dexter 0.18 doesn't build when DISPLAY is not set

[David Jaša]

I'm trying to build Dexter on Fedora Rawhide and I'm getting error during "./setup.py build" stage:

+ ./setup.py build
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./setup.py", line 99, in <module>
    cmdclass={'install': InstallAndUpdateDataDirectory}
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/DistUtilsExtra/auto.py", line 95, in setup
    __requires(attrs, src_all)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/DistUtilsExtra/auto.py", line 392, in __requires
    __add_imports(imports, s, attrs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/DistUtilsExtra/auto.py", line 338, in __add_imports
    if __external_mod(alias.name, attrs):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/DistUtilsExtra/auto.py", line 317, in __external_mod
    path = __import__(module).__file__
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.py", line 64, in <module>
    _init()
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.py", line 52, in _init
    _gtk.init_check()
RuntimeError: could not open display
error: Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.yvu0SL (%build)

I'm getting the same error when running "./setup.py build" manually in console, but not when in gnome-terminal , so I suspect that setup.py needs to have DISPLAY set and X running to build.

[Allen Lowe (lallenlowe)]

yes, it does require it. I use that setup.py script for debian packaging, I do not support it for standard installation, so I can't help you with this, sorry.

[Michel Lind (michel-slm)]

This is rather a serious problem -- I'm a Fedora developer, and would love to see more Elementary OS apps appearing in Fedora (in particular, Dexter and Postler). setup.py is the standard setup script for Python applications -- and our build servers intentionally build with DISPLAY and network access disabled (I've had to patch Python build scripts in the past to work around this).

Would you accept patches to fix this?

[Michel Lind (michel-slm)]

Marked this bug as a duplicate -- fix should be in python-distutils-extra