Meld error “Cannot import: GTK+; No module named repository”

Question

Meld used to work on my machine (openSuse Linux 13.1, Python 2.7.6) but after having trouble with Spyder (like it refusing to actually run any scripts), I uninstalled a large number of things, then slowly brought them back again.

Since then, meld does not work anymore. I keep getting this error message

> meld
Cannot import: GTK+
No module named gi

I was able to solve that by installing gi:

> pip install gi

Now the error is replaced by:

> meld
Cannot import: GTK+
No module named repository

... and here is a similar question where uninstalling gi apparently helped? I'm confused. I did try uninstalling it again but that just brought me back to the previous error (duh!).

Any ideas?

Answer 1

OK, that was not obvious:

gi.repository is not part of gi but its own thing. That's why gi should not be installed (thank you Moose).

This article then pointed me to a possible source, python-gobject. However, I already had that installed. So I installed other things that looked similar, and the python-gobject-cairo package ( Python 2.7, openSuse 13.1) did the trick. Seems like someone overlooked a dependency for Meld...

Answer 2

I unlinked the file that was showing in Expected in:

Expected in: /Applications/Meld.app/Contents/Frameworks/libz.1.dylib

unlink /Applications/Meld.app/Contents/Frameworks/libz.1.dylib

Answer 3

After changing python3 from version 3.7 to 3.6 error disappeared.

I have done that by:

sudo apt-get install python3.6
sudo rm /usr/bin/python3
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3.6 /usr/bin/python3