Cannot Build setup.py on RP4

[Fred Nikgohar]

Newbie here - was able to clone/build/install and run strandtest.py on RP4-first but when I tried running the exact same steps on my RP4-second, I get the following error output:

`Extracting in /tmp/tmpygytrjlh
Now working in /tmp/tmpygytrjlh/setuptools-5.7
Building a Setuptools egg in /home/pi/neopix/rpi_ws281x/python
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "setup.py", line 19, in
exec(init_file.read(), command_ns)
File "", line 11, in
File "/tmp/tmpygytrjlh/setuptools-5.7/setuptools/init.py", line 12, in
from setuptools.extension import Extension
File "/tmp/tmpygytrjlh/setuptools-5.7/setuptools/extension.py", line 7, in
from setuptools.dist import _get_unpatched
File "/tmp/tmpygytrjlh/setuptools-5.7/setuptools/dist.py", line 18, in
import pkg_resources
File "/tmp/tmpygytrjlh/setuptools-5.7/pkg_resources.py", line 1520, in
register_loader_type(importlib_bootstrap.SourceFileLoader, DefaultProvider)
AttributeError: module 'importlib._bootstrap' has no attribute 'SourceFileLoader'
/home/pi/neopix/rpi_ws281x/python/setuptools-5.7-py3.7.egg
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/pi/neopix/rpi_ws281x/python/ez_setup.py", line 142, in use_setuptools
pkg_resources.require("setuptools>=" + version)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/init.py", line 900, in require
needed = self.resolve(parse_requirements(requirements))
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/init.py", line 786, in resolve
raise DistributionNotFound(req, requirers)
pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: The 'setuptools>=5.7' distribution was not found and is required by the application

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "setup.py", line 4, in
use_setuptools()
File "/home/pi/neopix/rpi_ws281x/python/ez_setup.py", line 145, in use_setuptools
return _do_download(version, download_base, to_dir, download_delay)
File "/home/pi/neopix/rpi_ws281x/python/ez_setup.py", line 120, in _do_download
_build_egg(egg, archive, to_dir)
File "/home/pi/neopix/rpi_ws281x/python/ez_setup.py", line 69, in _build_egg
raise IOError('Could not build the egg.')
OSError: Could not build the egg.
`
I'm very new to the Linux operating system. I do know there's very little difference between my dev platform (RP4-first) and my production (RP4-second) platform. Any ideas whats happening here?

[Philip Howard]

The Python code here is deprecated:

sudo pip3 install rpi_ws281x

[Fred Nikgohar]

I tried to install rpi_ws281x but it turned out that my production machine did not have pip3 installed.

Once I installed pip3,

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

I was able to build setup.py correctly... and from there everything worked great.

Thanks a lot

/F

[Fred Nikgohar]

Perhaps this is the wrong place to have this discussion but any idea why vast majority of people can't get the Adafruit Blinka (CircuitPython Lib) installed on their machine? I noticed that was the last step in your implementation but if I've understood that correct, why the need for this library?

{{PS. let me know i'm happy to delete this comment if there's a better place to ask this question}}

[Philip Howard]

The Blinka/CircuitPython lib is unrelated to rpi_ws281x- albeit we did once have a "neopixel" library as part of the Python distribution that we dropped at their request- they wanted to build cross-platform "neopixel" support, using rpi_ws281x but without the two packages conflicting.

There should be no need for it!