HowTo: Install Python, PIP and cx_Oracle on MSYS2 / Windows

Here’s how to install Python, PIP package installer and cx_Oracle extension module on MSYS2:

$ pacman -S python
warning: python-3.8.3-1 is up to date — reinstalling
resolving dependencies…
looking for conflicting packages…

Packages (1) python-3.8.3-1

Total Installed Size:  108.66 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:        0.00 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y

…

$ pacman -S cx_Oracle
error: target not found: cx_Oracle

$ pip install cx_Oracle
bash: pip: command not found

$ pacman -S python-pip
resolving dependencies…
looking for conflicting packages…

Packages (2) python-setuptools-47.1.1-1  python-pip-20.1.1-1

Total Download Size:    2.22 MiB
Total Installed Size:  10.91 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y
:: Retrieving packages…
…

$ pip install cx_Oracle
Collecting cx_Oracle
  Downloading cx_Oracle-8.0.0.tar.gz (325 kB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 325 kB 693 kB/s
Using legacy setup.py install for cx-Oracle, since package ‘wheel’ is not installed.
Installing collected packages: cx-Oracle
    Running setup.py install for cx-Oracle … error
    ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
     command: /usr/bin/python3.exe -u -c ‘import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = ‘"’"’/tmp/pip-install-wqtzv2rv/cx-Oracle/setup.py’"’"’; __file__=’"’"’/tmp/pip-install-wqtzv2rv/cx-Oracle/setup.py’"’"’;f=getattr(tokenize, ‘"’"’open’"’"’, open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace(‘"’"’\r\n’"’"’, ‘"’"’\n’"’"’);f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, ‘"’"’exec’"’"’))’ install –record /tmp/pip-record-mui2mjs9/install-record.txt –single-version-externally-managed –compile –install-headers /usr/include/python3.8/cx-Oracle
         cwd: /tmp/pip-install-wqtzv2rv/cx-Oracle/
    Complete output (17 lines):
    running install
    running build
    running build_ext
    building ‘cx_Oracle’ extension
    creating build
    creating build/temp.msys-3.1.5-x86_64-3.8
    creating build/temp.msys-3.1.5-x86_64-3.8/src
    creating build/temp.msys-3.1.5-x86_64-3.8/odpi
    creating build/temp.msys-3.1.5-x86_64-3.8/odpi/src
    x86_64-pc-msys-gcc -Wno-unused-result -Wsign-compare -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe -DCXO_BUILD_VERSION=8.0.0 -Iodpi/include -Iodpi/src -I/usr/include/python3.8 -c src/cxoApiType.c -o build/temp.msys-3.1.5-x86_64-3.8/src/cxoApiType.o
    In file included from src/cxoModule.h:14,
                     from src/cxoApiType.c:11:
    /usr/include/python3.8/Python.h:44:10: fatal error: crypt.h: No such file or directory
       44 | #include <crypt.h>
          |          ^~~~~~~~~
    compilation terminated.
    error: command ‘x86_64-pc-msys-gcc’ failed with exit status 1
    —————————————-
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: /usr/bin/python3.exe -u -c ‘import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = ‘"’"’/tmp/pip-install-wqtzv2rv/cx-Oracle/setup.py’"’"’; __file__=’"’"’/tmp/pip-install-wqtzv2rv/cx-Oracle/setup.py’"’"’;f=getattr(tokenize, ‘"’"’open’"’"’, open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace(‘"’"’\r\n’"’"’, ‘"’"’\n’"’"’);f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, ‘"’"’exec’"’"’))’ install –record /tmp/pip-record-mui2mjs9/install-record.txt –single-version-externally-managed –compile –install-headers /usr/include/python3.8/cx-Oracle Check the logs for full command output.

Found a solution here for other Linuxes, mentioning

apt install python-dev clang libcrypt-dev

Via MSYS2 package manager (pacman), libcrypt and libcrypt-devel seem to be available. The second one should fetch the first one if needed, together with header files for development.

$ pacman -S libcrypt-devel
resolving dependencies…
looking for conflicting packages…

Packages (1) libcrypt-devel-2.1-2

Total Download Size:   0.04 MiB
Total Installed Size:  0.04 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y
…

Now we can install cx_Oracle succesfully:

$ pip install cx_Oracle
Collecting cx_Oracle
  Using cached cx_Oracle-8.0.0.tar.gz (325 kB)
Using legacy setup.py install for cx-Oracle, since package ‘wheel’ is not installed.
Installing collected packages: cx-Oracle
    Running setup.py install for cx-Oracle … done
Successfully installed cx-Oracle-8.0.0

Python rstrip and whitespace

Was just reading

https://www.w3schools.com/python/ref_string_rstrip.asp

which says

The rstrip() method removes any trailing characters (characters at the end a string), space is the default trailing character to remove.

Notes:

1) the chars param was added at Python 2.2.3, can’t use it at older versions as noted at

https://docs.python.org/2.6/library/string.html

string.rstrip(s[, chars])

Return a copy of the string with trailing characters removed. If chars is omitted or None, whitespace characters are removed. If given and not None, chars must be a string; the characters in the string will be stripped from the end of the string this method is called on.

Changed in version 2.2.3: The chars parameter was added. The chars parameter cannot be passed in earlier 2.2 versions.

2) from the official doc and other docs too I read the default is to remove whitespace characters, not just the space char:

https://python-reference.readthedocs.io/en/latest/docs/str/rstrip.html

chars

Optional. String specifying the set of characters to be removed. If omitted or None, the chars argument defaults to removing whitespace. The chars argument is not a prefix; rather, all combinations of its values are stripped.

Not sure what is considered whitespace in various Python versions though. At least in Python2 it wasn’t removing \r in both Solaris and MSYS2 (a POSIX environment on Windows) where I just tried.

For example, I was just debugging some program that was working in Python 3, but in Python 2 it was moving the cursor to the start of the line when printing a raw_input prompt with some string it had read before…
…the issue proved to be that it was opening a file with ‘r’ mode instead of ‘rU’ which is universal newlines mode – https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0278/ – converts \r\n to \n – and it seems that rstrip was failing to remove the \r from the end of those strings.

In Python 3 it was either using the universal newlines mode by default and thus stripping the \r from strings while reading from the file, or the rstrip was removing \r too in Python3, but I guess it was the 1st case (didn’t do any more check since the universal newlines read file open mode fixed the issue in Python 2 for me).

Speaking of that, I wonder whether Python considers whitespace differently on Windows and on Unixes (aka having [l/r]strip commands remove \r on the 1st but not on the 2nd case), which would be an extra complexity when writing portable s/w.