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MS Python: How to deal with the pain of “unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

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Re: MS Python: How to deal with the pain of “unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

#11

Post by xenophonf »

tdicola wrote: post #7

This is a very odd blog post in my opinion coming from MS. It acknowledges the pain of dealing with source distributions on Windows and gives excellent advice on how to overcome the issues. However I think it really misses the forest through the trees. If MS was really serious about Python being a first class citizen on Windows then fix the root problem which the post acknowledges, ".... Because Windows has a differe…

  Why doesn't Visual C++ express come installed or as a
  super easy to install dependency on Windows?
In theory that's what VCForPython27.msi (and the others) are supposed to be. And in theory it isn't too difficult to download and install the Express or Community editions of Visual Studio 2015.

A Windows feature that installed the matching C++ compiler plus platform SDK would be freaking AWESOME.

  as a side note many thanks to them
No kidding. Us Python on Windows users really owe them a debt of gratitude.

Re: MS Python: How to deal with the pain of “unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

#12

Post by wyldfire »

dsp1234 wrote: post #4
wyldfire wrote: post #3

I guess I knew in general about wheels but didn't see how it would solve "usability" problems like this one. Does `pip install lxml` fail in a similarly perplexing way if you don't have `build-essential` (`gcc` et al) installed? If so maybe the difference is that the posix/linux crowd is more likely to have installed a compiler at this point. Here's hoping MSFT's Linux ABI support evolves into the norm for a port tar…

compilation terminated. ********************************************************************************* Could not find function xmlCheckVersion in library libxml2. Is libxml2 installed? ********************************************************************************* error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1 ---------------------------------------- Cleaning up... Command /usr/bin/python -c "im…

Was that error because gcc was missing or because libxml2-dev wasn't installed?

Re: MS Python: How to deal with the pain of “unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

#13

Post by x1798DE »

xenophonf wrote: post #11
tdicola wrote: post #7

This is a very odd blog post in my opinion coming from MS. It acknowledges the pain of dealing with source distributions on Windows and gives excellent advice on how to overcome the issues. However I think it really misses the forest through the trees. If MS was really serious about Python being a first class citizen on Windows then fix the root problem which the post acknowledges, ".... Because Windows has a differe…

Why doesn't Visual C++ express come installed or as a super easy to install dependency on Windows? In theory that's what VCForPython27.msi (and the others) are supposed to be. And in theory it isn't too difficult to download and install the Express or Community editions of Visual Studio 2015. A Windows feature that installed the matching C++ compiler plus platform SDK would be freaking AWESOME. as a side note many th…

Last time I tried doing this, it was very unclear to me if there was a way to download the VS compiler without giving an email address or logging in or something to Microsoft. In the end, this was one of the big drivers that pushed me over the edge to switching to 100% Linux.

Re: MS Python: How to deal with the pain of “unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

#14

Post by marmaduke »

tdicola wrote: post #7

This is a very odd blog post in my opinion coming from MS. It acknowledges the pain of dealing with source distributions on Windows and gives excellent advice on how to overcome the issues. However I think it really misses the forest through the trees. If MS was really serious about Python being a first class citizen on Windows then fix the root problem which the post acknowledges, ".... Because Windows has a differe…

It's not first class support but it goes a long to patch potholes in a bumpy road to installing extensions from source. Motivated but unkowledgeable users are much more likely to succeed with this info while the benefit between just a blog post and having it built in to OS may be negligible (while the technical investment of building the compiler into the OS could be significant).

By the way MS provides free official VMs for testing IE but work just fine for building wheels.

Re: MS Python: How to deal with the pain of “unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

#15

Post by RubyPinch »

xenophonf wrote: post #8

If none of these options is available, you will need to consider building the extension yourself. In many cases this is not difficult... This is horseshit. I spent a few weeks at the beginning of the year building MSIs for SaltStack and its dependencies, as I wanted a fully native way to bootstrap a Windows client installation via GPO using a native Python installation instead of SaltStack's NSIS executable installer…

Not trying to be rude, but that seems more like an issue with lack of research, for all of your initial troubles.

Python was compiled by Visual Studio 2008, up until Python 3.5, and I believe that was made clear in the extension module documentation for python.

Having used 3.5 and VS2015 (after waiting for multiple days just for VS to finish installing), everything else has worked pretty spiffy since

Re: MS Python: How to deal with the pain of “unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

#16

Post by tdicola »

marmaduke wrote: post #14
tdicola wrote: post #7

This is a very odd blog post in my opinion coming from MS. It acknowledges the pain of dealing with source distributions on Windows and gives excellent advice on how to overcome the issues. However I think it really misses the forest through the trees. If MS was really serious about Python being a first class citizen on Windows then fix the root problem which the post acknowledges, ".... Because Windows has a differe…

It's not first class support but it goes a long to patch potholes in a bumpy road to installing extensions from source. Motivated but unkowledgeable users are much more likely to succeed with this info while the benefit between just a blog post and having it built in to OS may be negligible (while the technical investment of building the compiler into the OS could be significant). By the way MS provides free official…

Yeah I've used those VMs and it's nice but they're only valid for 90 days and IMHO the licensing is kind of murky (it says they're only for testing IE). You also don't have a choice of 32bit vs. 64bit VM (I've noticed the win 7 VM is 32 bit, the win 10 VM is 64 bit for example). There really should just be 100% free for any use VMs that never expire for library maintainers to use.

Re: MS Python: How to deal with the pain of “unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

#17

Post by dsp1234 »

wyldfire wrote: post #12
dsp1234 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

compilation terminated. ********************************************************************************* Could not find function xmlCheckVersion in library libxml2. Is libxml2 installed? ********************************************************************************* error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1 ---------------------------------------- Cleaning up... Command /usr/bin/python -c "im…

Was that error because gcc was missing or because libxml2-dev wasn't installed?

Touche, python-pip on ubuntu has a dev requirement on build-essential. So it should be rare that it's not installed.

Re: MS Python: How to deal with the pain of “unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

#19

Post by dr_zoidberg »

x1798DE wrote: post #13
xenophonf wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't Visual C++ express come installed or as a super easy to install dependency on Windows? In theory that's what VCForPython27.msi (and the others) are supposed to be. And in theory it isn't too difficult to download and install the Express or Community editions of Visual Studio 2015. A Windows feature that installed the matching C++ compiler plus platform SDK would be freaking AWESOME. as a side note many th…

Last time I tried doing this, it was very unclear to me if there was a way to download the VS compiler without giving an email address or logging in or something to Microsoft. In the end, this was one of the big drivers that pushed me over the edge to switching to 100% Linux.

This is the link where you download the MSVC for Python 2.7 installer: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=442...

Once it loads, close the survey popup thay may or may not appear and hit the download button. No need to login or put your email or anything.

I thought you were going to say that even with it installed, there are rare ocassions where the system doesn't acknowledge the existance of MSVC, for example Cython.

I thought the post might give a solution to that particular issue, but so far it seems nothing has changed in that aspect.

Re: MS Python: How to deal with the pain of “unable to find vcvarsall.bat”

#20

Post by recursive »

wyldfire wrote: post #3

I guess I knew in general about wheels but didn't see how it would solve "usability" problems like this one. Does `pip install lxml` fail in a similarly perplexing way if you don't have `build-essential` (`gcc` et al) installed? If so maybe the difference is that the posix/linux crowd is more likely to have installed a compiler at this point. Here's hoping MSFT's Linux ABI support evolves into the norm for a port tar…

I tried to get into linux development within the last year or so. One of the most frustrating obstacles I ran into was that attempting to install packages would mysteriously fail. I found it that was because I was missing a package called "build-essential". I thought one of the package manager's reason for existence was that it could track dependencies, and it didn't appear to be doing that. I still don't understand how that can happen. It seems to me that a package installation ought to be tested against a fresh image to verify the dependency tracking is working correctly.
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