Feature or enhancement
Proposal:
Currently, if we don't find the standard library, we fail with an obscure message.
$ PYTHONHOME=nonsense ./python -c 'print("foo!")' Fatal Python error: Failed to import encodings module Python runtime state: core initialized Exception ignored in the internal traceback machinery: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'traceback' ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings' Stack (most recent call first):
This is a common problem, as can be seen with a quick google search. One of the top results is a nonsense AI slop blogpost.
It is generally caused or a misconfigured Python home directory, either by setting PYTHONHOME, or by broken virtual environments.
It would be helpful to show a warning if we are unable to find a valid standard library during initialization.
WARN: Could not find the standard library directory! The Python 'home' directory was set to 'nonsense', is this correct? Fatal Python error: Failed to import encodings module Python runtime state: core initialized Exception ignored in the internal traceback machinery: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'traceback' ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings' Stack (most recent call first):
Bad ._pth files can also cause this.
Has this already been discussed elsewhere?
No response given
Links to previous discussion of this feature:
No response