Cairocffi not building with XCB support in 1.5.0

[elParaguayo]

I'm one of the qtile developers and I've noticed that our github actions and docs are both failing since the release of 1.5.0.

At first, I thought this was an issue due to both those build environments using Ubuntu 20.04 but switching to 22.04 doesn't change anything. I've also just tried on my laptop and it also fails.

Steps to reproduce:

• Create a clean virtual environment
• pip install xcffib
• pip install --upgrade --no-cache cairocffi

Start a python terminal:

>>> from cairocffi import cairo
>>> cairo.cairo_xcb_surface_create

This will generate the following error:

AttributeError: cffi library 'libcairo.so.2' has no function, constant or global variable named 'cairo_xcb_surface_create'. Did you mean: 'cairo_pdf_surface_create'?

I can get it to build ok with 1.4.0 so something's stopping it working in 1.5.0.

Happy to help debug this so let me know if there's more information needed.

[liZe]

Thanks for the bug report, and sorry for that. The problem comes from the isolation during the build of the wheel. A dirty workaround is to use:

pip install xcffib wheel
pip install --no-cache --upgrade --no-build-isolation cairocffi

There’s probably a setup option in setuptools to install xcffib before the build, only when the [xcb] option is set.

[elParaguayo]

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll test later today and report back.

I'd also be happy to do a PR to update your docs for this.

[liZe]

I'd also be happy to do a PR to update your docs for this.

Thanks for your help. I’m sure we can find a proper way to handle this in the code.

[elParaguayo]

OK - I'll hold off PR for now but I can confirm the commands in your first reply work for me locally so I'm pretty confident they'll work on our builds once I've updated them.

Thanks for the assistance - greatly appreciated.

[liZe]

We can keep this issue open until a new package is released.

[liZe]

A question has been open: pypa/setuptools#3873

[liZe]

Version 1.5.1 has been released, tests are welcome!

[Malex]

It was still broken for me when installing qtile (environments: Funtoo and Gentoo, python3.10, etc)

I could resolve it by manually running this command:
pip install --no-build-isolation --no-cache --upgrade --ignore-installed cairocffi[xcb]

[liZe]

@Malex Hi!

It doesn’t work anymore for me too. I don’t know why.

During the wheel generation, Setuptools complains that it doesn’t find pip:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/lize/venv/bin/pip", line 5, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.main import main
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pip'

Even if I add pip as a build dependency, it doesn’t work because the building script doesn’t find the freshly installed xcffib package (the error is silenced by this try, but it doesn’t work).

I don’t know what to do, I’ve already spent days trying to fix this.

[Malex]

Trying to understand why 1.4 worked but 1.5 did not, I took a look at the diffs and there are a few changes that could have impacted
v1.4.0...v1.5.1
I noticed there is a switch from setup.cfg to pyproject.toml and other related changes.
A "solution" could just be to revert this

[liZe]

A "solution" could just be to revert this

I’d like to avoid that, in order to have a future-proof packaging system that follows PEP-517 and PEP-518, but if it’s the only way to get this working, maybe that’s the only solution…

[liZe]

Let’s fix this instead: https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy/cffi/-/issues/441

Anyone interested?

[fgplastina]

i'm getting this error. Tried everything in this thread but didn't work :/

[liZe]

i'm getting this error. Tried everything in this thread but didn't work :/

You can install version 1.4.0 of CairoCFFI.

[fgplastina]

@liZe you are right!

I tried that in the first instance and it didn't work, I just needed to add those arguments to the pip command and specify version 1.4.0. Thanks for your answer!