Question

When running a cxfreeze binary from a python3.2 project I am getting the following runtime error:

/project/dist/project/distutils/__init__.py:13: UserWarning: The virtualenv distutils package at %s appears to be in the same location as the system distutils?
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/chrish/.virtualenvs/project/lib/python3.2/distutils/__init__.py", line 19, in <module>
    import dist
ImportError: No module named dist

Correspondingly there are several distutils entries in the missing modules section of the cxfreeze output:

? dist imported from distutils
? distutils.ccompiler imported from numpy.distutils.ccompiler
? distutils.cmd imported from setuptools.dist
? distutils.command.build_ext imported from distutils
? distutils.core imported from numpy.distutils.core
...

I’ve tried forcing distutils to be included as a module, by both importing it in my main python file and by adding it to a cxfreeze setup.py as:

options = {"build_exe": {"packages" : ["distutils"]} },

Neither approach worked. It seems likely that I’ve somehow broken the virtualenv [as distutils seems fundamental and the warning regarding the location of distutils], repeating with a clean virtualenv replicated the problem.

It may be worth noting that I installed cx-freeze by running $VIRTUAL_ENV/build/cx-freeze/setup.py install as it doesn’t install cleanly in pip.

Answer 1

Summarising my comments:

The copy of distutils in the virtualenv is doing some bizarre things which confuse cx_Freeze. The simple workaround is to freeze outside a virtualenv, so that it uses the system copy of distutils.

On Ubuntu, Python 2 and 3 co-exist happily: just use python3 to do anything with Python 3. E.g. to install cx_Freeze under Python 3: python3 setup.py install.