No such file or directory: 'C:\\Program Files\\Meson\\mesonbuild\\scripts\\python_info.py'

[KyrietS]

Hi,

I tried compiling Cairo but when I ran meson setup build/ I got an error:

meson.build:111:27: ERROR: <PythonExternalProgram 'python3' -> ['C:\\Program Files\\Meson\\meson.exe', 'runpython']> is not a valid python or it is missing distutils

Inside build/meson-logs/meson-log.txt I can see:

Program stderr:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "mesonbuild\mesonmain.py", line 194, in run
  File "mesonbuild\mesonmain.py", line 149, in run_runpython_command
  File "runpy.py", line 288, in run_path
  File "runpy.py", line 252, in _get_code_from_file
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Program Files\\Meson\\mesonbuild\\scripts\\python_info.py'

My specs:

• Windows 11
• Python 3.11.3
• Meson 1.1.0

I saw:

• PEP 632: Proposed deprectation of distutils #7702
• python module: migrate away from the use of distutils #11133

Did I do something wrong or just Meson is broken on the latest Python version?

[eli-schwartz]

The error here claims it cannot find the introspection script (which uses both sysconfig and distutils, so it's not related to the distutils deprecation).

The introspection script internally uses https://docs.python.org/3/library/importlib.resources.html to locate data, which in this case is supposed to return either the original file packed into the application or else a temporary file containing the contents, whichever is available. Seemingly, it is returning a file that doesn't actually exist. I'm not sure why...

[eli-schwartz]

OK, this is a bug in our collection hook. PyInstaller requires it to be listed as a data file.

[KyrietS]

I don't know how long it will take to produce a new installer or (maybe) bump a version of Meson, so here I give a workaround for other users:

cd your_project
git clone [email protected]:mesonbuild/meson.git
python -m meson.meson setup builddir/

It worked for me 👍

[eli-schwartz]

I would just use pip install meson for that. :)

There's also a meson.py script at the root of the git clone, which you can use as python path/to/git/clone/meson.py setup builddir/.

[eli-schwartz]

Copied to a bug report in #11689

[KyrietS]

Thank you for such a quick response! I will test your fix as soon as a new installer comes out 🤗