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macoshomebrewgtk3pygobject

OSX: importing gi from pygobject3: "ImportError: cannot import name _gi"


I had a working python program that uses GTK3 as installed with homebrew. After updating my OSX system I now get the error:

import gi   
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gi/__init__.py", line 42, in <module> 
ImportError: cannot import name _gi

The minimal example that produces this error would be:

# import_gi.py
import gi
print gi.__dict__

which produces:

=> /usr/local/Cellar/python\@2/2.7.14_3/bin/python2 import_gi.py 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "import_gi.py", line 1, in <module>
    import gi
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gi/__init__.py", line 42, in <module>
ImportError: cannot import name _gi

I've tried running

brew reinstall pygobject3 --with-python2

which did not fix the problem.

Does someone have an idea of what may be going on?


Solution

  • It looks like homebrew is no longer automatically updating python2 by default. This fixed the issue:

    brew reinstall pygobject3 --with-python@2