How to fix “module 'platform' has no attribute 'linux_distribution'” when installing new packages with Python3.8?

Question

I had Python versions of 2.7 and 3.5. I wanted the install a newer version of Python which is python 3.8. I am using Ubuntu 16.04 and I can not just uninstall Python 3.5 due

Answer 1

The problem is that package.linux_distribution was deprecated starting with Python 3.5(?). and removed altogether for Python 3.8.

Use the distro package instead. This package only works on Linux however.

I ran into this problem after installing OpenCobolIDE on Linux Mint 20, having upgraded Python to the latest level. have submitted a code fix to the OpenCobolIDE author to review and test. I was able to get the IDE to start up and run with this fix.

Essentially the fix uses the distro package if available, otherwise it uses the old platform package. For example:

This code imports distro if available:

import platform
using_distro = False
try:
    import distro
    using_distro = True
except ImportError:
    pass

Then you can test the value of using_distro to determine whether to get the linux distro type from package or distro, for example:

if using_distro:
    linux_distro = distro.like()
else:
    linux_distro = platform.linux_distribution()[0]