Apologies, I’m just not sure how you could get yourself into a state where you have to manually activate the venv? The docs at Linux - Mycroft AI basically just say “run dev_setup.sh” and this is where padome says his install is failing. Doesn’t “dev_setup.sh” cause all the requisite apt packages to be installed? Even if he wasn’t installing into the venv, I’m not sure there would be any way that using pip could rectify the problem; AFAICT the only thing that could rectify things is getting the right system libs installed. I’m confused about why the venv matters (but I’m often confused).
Well now you know at least one way.
dev_setup.sh seems to have gotten the package and its venv part of the way through setup. How it got there and where it quit, I dunno, because it would’ve been the first time through, before this thread was posted.
Users don’t usually need to install the pypi-hosted cffi manually because it’s almost always a dep of a dep, and it’s sometimes available systemwide. However, by whatever means, dependency installation in this case got far enough that it failed to install cffi but seems to have believed it had the dependent. I have nothing further to offer about the how.
What took me forever to notice is that OP made a typo the first time they tried to download cffi using pip.
My last guess is that the dependent didn’t try to install cffi, assuming it would be available systemwide, and that OP would’ve seen the same improvement if they had pip installed it outside the venv.
One way or another, if you’re in a state where you have to manually install a dep, and you don’t mean to manually install it systemwide, you’ll have to manually activate the venv before running pip.
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