Hello all, does anyone know what may be causing the following error when trying to bootstrap pants?

c/_cffi_backend.c:15:10: fatal error: 'ffi.h' file not found
#include <ffi.h>
         ^
1 error generated.

It has occurred on a coworkers machine after upgrading to Mac Mojave (which we are not currently on). We have attempted to install

libffi

through homebrew on the machine

have you installed the

cffi

package?

Ah, will check and run on the laptop when he is back from a meeting. That makes a lot of sense

also, make sure that you don't have

echo "$GCC"

set to anything

well, it shouldn't be happening imo and i've been meaning to fix having to have these requirements preinstalled for a while

have seen system headers go missing when that was misconfigured.

but there are known packages you have to have installed to have this bootstrap and i think

cffi

will affect the one you have there (noting stu's comment)

@aloof-angle-91616:

cffi

is a python package, right?

yes, i was going to make that clear and didn't.

pip install cffi

should work

that's a c header

yes

I have seen some recommendations about symlinking gcc so’s, but that seems like pushing back problems for a later time

i'm thinking of how to repro this effectively

afaik, there should not be any setup required with regard to ffi, so i would suspect the compiler environment.

well

cffi

definitely needs to be installed so if that's not installed it needs to be done anyway

I have

cffi

on my machine and do not have this problem:

$ pip freeze | ag cffi
cffi==1.10.0

ah! then listen to stu

Well, I believe I will need it on my co-workers laptop and will be able to try that some time this afternoon 🙂

oh! i think it's the xcode tools

ah!

/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/include/ffi/ffi.h

on my machine

(re cffi: i'm pretty certain it does not need to be installed. it's in the venv that we create during bootstrap)

I see that and will check on his computer

$ ls /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/include/ffi/
ffi.h           ffi_common.h    fficonfig.h     ffitarget.h     ppc-darwin.h    ppc-ffitarget.h x86-ffitarget.h

We tried

xcode-select --install

, but it instructed us to update/upgrade from XCode. I will try that before installing

cffi

through pip

ok, i would recommend that

guessing that that would be due to a transitive dep on

ffi-devel

or something

now that's a protip

Thanks guys! I will let you all know how far we get this afternoon. I think this is the most likely problem

i am using mojave and we have had to make several changes to support it since then, we are absolutely supporting mojave to build pants so please raise any further issues you see bootstrapping