Importing python-pygit2 correctly on RHEL7.2 (For use in SaltStack gitfs)

Question

I'm trying to setup gitfs for SaltStack, using the pygit2 method. I've installed pygit2 and libgit2 on my machine:

[root@r9tvap1109 site-packages]# yum list installed | grep git2
libgit2.x86_64                        0.21.5-1.el7               @epel
python-pygit2.x86_64                  0.21.4-2.el7               @epel

I've also installed the python-devel package. This is all for Python 2.7.

Whenever I try to import the pygit2 package to test if it was installed correctly I get a bunch of cffi warnings and errors. That ends with this stack trace:

    pygit2/__pycache__/pygit2_cffi_c721781dxbf062fb5.c:6893:21: error: (near initialization for ‘nums[19]’)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "pygit2/__init__.py", line 35, in <module>
    from .blame import Blame, BlameHunk
  File "pygit2/blame.py", line 32, in <module>
    from .errors import check_error
  File "pygit2/errors.py", line 29, in <module>
    from .ffi import ffi, C
  File "pygit2/ffi.py", line 35, in <module>
    ffi, C = get_ffi()
  File "pygit2/_utils.py", line 101, in get_ffi
    include_dirs=[libgit2_include], library_dirs=[libgit2_lib])
  File "cffi/api.py", line 450, in verify
    lib = self.verifier.load_library()
  File "cffi/verifier.py", line 113, in load_library
    self._compile_module()
  File "cffi/verifier.py", line 210, in _compile_module
    outputfilename = ffiplatform.compile(tmpdir, self.get_extension())
  File "cffi/ffiplatform.py", line 29, in compile
    outputfilename = _build(tmpdir, ext, compiler_verbose)
  File "cffi/ffiplatform.py", line 62, in _build
    raise VerificationError('%s: %s' % (e.__class__.__name__, e))
cffi.ffiplatform.VerificationError: CompileError: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

Here is a list of things I've tried:

• uninstalling/reinstalling (using yum)
• Installing libgit2 via binaries, then trying to install pygit2 using pip (also fails due to GCC compiler error).
• Verified that I have a GCC compiler installed
• Tried moving cffi file found in /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages to [..]pygit2/pycache/
• Done some searching on other questions - I found this link See comment by JDavid about half way down about 2 solutions

Any help is appreciated

Answer 1

I figured out the problem - I had a newer version of python-cffi than the package would support. I downgraded from 1.6.0-5 to 0.8.6-2