[Xenial/Kinetic] __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'strict'

[mintar]

Problem

When python-future is installed, catkin_lint crashes with the error above. This is a bug in python-future 0.15 that was fixed in 0.16, but Xenial still has python-future 0.15.

This is not a bug in catkin_lint, but I thought I'd still mention it here so that others with the same problem can find the solution.

Steps to reproduce

$ docker run --rm -it ros:kinetic-ros-core /bin/bash -c 'apt update && apt install -y python-catkin-lint python-future && catkin_create_pkg foo && catkin_lint foo'
# [...]
catkin_lint: internal error: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'strict'

Solution

sudo apt remove python-future

Alternatively, if you really need it, use pip to install python-future >= 0.16.

[mintar]

I'm closing this immediately because it's a third-party bug, as I said above.

[roehling]

I converted this issue into a discussion, which is probably easier to find for people running into this problem.

[mintar]

Oh, I didn't even know that GitHub had added a "Discussions" feature. Interesting.

[roehling]

It's relatively new and still in beta, so it has to be enabled on a per-repository basis.

[roehling]

As this issue seems to be coming up again, I wanted to discuss options here. I am willing to accommodate Xenial with a workaround if it is not too intrusive. Maybe it's sufficient to remove the strict=True argument from the constructor, as it is the default setting anyway.

[jarvisschultz]

I was unable to remove python-future, but I can confirm installing an updated version of configparser via pip did work around this issue.

@roehling after posting #94 yesterday I did spend a few minutes digging into what it would take to make things work with the old Python 2.7 version of ConfigParser, and unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as removing strict=True (which is what I was hoping). I believe the usage of configparser could be rewritten in a way that is compatible with all versions of configparser, but it isn't trivial. I didn't spend too much time on it, but here are a few things I noticed right off the bat:

• The current code has a lot of snippets like this config["catkin_lint"]["rosdistro"] = args.rosdistro that take advantage of a __setitem__ method newer versions provide. This would need to be replaced with something like config.set("catkin_lint", "rosdistro", args.rosdistro) or a __setitem__ method would need to be provided.
• The usage of config.read_file is not supported with the old version, but I believe config.readfp is equivalent
• This snippet config[section].update(severity_overrides) would need to be rewritten to avoid the usage of __setitem__ or as listed in the first bullet, a __setitem__ would need to be provided.

[roehling]

This pretty much amounts to reverting to the legacy API, which I would really like to avoid. However, the issue has been fixed in Ubuntu 18.04, which still uses the exact same upstream version of python-future (0.15.2), so I backported the fix to Ubuntu 16.04 and published it in my Ubuntu ROS PPA. Maybe that helps.

[roehling]

Here is a direct download link for python-future_0.15.2-4ubuntu2~16.04_all.deb if you want to avoid adding the whole PPA to your system.

[jarvisschultz]

I agree the effort of reverting to the legacy API isn't worth it, especially since this is a pretty rare circumstance.

Thanks for the deb/PPA definitely could be helpful!