maas-cli from PPA errors out with traceback - ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'provisioningserver'

[Jeff Lane ]

at some point in the recent past, the maas cli (not maas-cli which is, confusingly an entirely different tool) has started throwing a traceback:

$ maas --help
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/maas", line 11, in <module>
    load_entry_point('maas==3.2.1', 'console_scripts', 'maas')()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 490, in load_entry_point
    return get_distribution(dist).load_entry_point(group, name)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2854, in load_entry_point
    return ep.load()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2445, in load
    return self.resolve()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2451, in resolve
    module = __import__(self.module_name, fromlist=['__name__'], level=0)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/maascli/__init__.py", line 10, in <module>
    from maascli.parser import get_deepest_subparser, prepare_parser
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/maascli/parser.py", line 12, in <module>
    from maascli.cli import register_cli_commands
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/maascli/cli.py", line 30, in <module>
    from provisioningserver.certificates import check_certificate
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'provisioningserver'

I'm unable to use the maas cli tool now.

Note this is from the 3.2 debs on Focal. I was able to use maas cli from the 3.2 snap on a different machine. HOWEVER, I don't want to install a 150MB snap on my local machine just to get remote api access. The 3.2 debs are only a few KB in size:

$ ll /var/cache/apt/archives/*maas* -h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 37K Aug 3 15:48 /var/cache/apt/archives/maas-cli_1%3a3.2.1-12003-g.e0fedd282-0ubuntu1~20.04.1_all.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 67K Aug 3 15:48 /var/cache/apt/archives/python3-maas-client_1%3a3.2.1-12003-g.e0fedd282-0ubuntu1~20.04.1_all.deb

So just over 100KB in size compared to the full MAAS snap:
3.2/stable: 3.2.2-12005-g.f0f96fa78 2022-08-08 (23178) 147MB

[Nobuto Murata (nobuto)]

The module "provisioningserver" is offered by python3-maas-provisioningserver, but maas-cli doesn't depends on it and it will consume ~50MB disk space additionally in the current packaging structure.

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The following NEW packages will be installed:
  curtin-common python-babel-localedata python3-babel python3-bcrypt python3-boto python3-bs4 python3-bson python3-bson-ext python3-crochet python3-curtin python3-dateutil python3-decorator
  python3-dnspython python3-formencode python3-html5lib python3-iso8601 python3-lxml python3-maas-provisioningserver python3-paramiko python3-pbr python3-prettytable python3-prometheus-client
  python3-pylxd python3-pyparsing python3-pypureomapi python3-pyvmomi python3-requests-toolbelt python3-seamicroclient python3-simplestreams python3-soupsieve python3-txtftp python3-uvloop
  python3-webencodings python3-ws4py
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After this operation, 49.4 MB of additional disk space will be used.
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[Jerzy Husakowski (jhusakowski)]

MAAS cli shouldn't depend on provisioning server, the shared code should either be part of a common package, or there should be no shared code. We also need to fix import checker to detect incorrect dependencies in MAAS cli.