Bug#1095173: visidata: vd wrapper stopped working

[Raphaël Bleuse]

Hi,

I hope my 2 cents help.

On Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:57:17 +0000 Markus Koller <markus at snafu.ch> wrote:
> Package: visidata
> Version: 3.0.2-1
> Severity: important
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
> The wrapper in /usr/bin/vd stopped working and now fails
> with this error:
> 
>   Traceback (most recent call last):
>     File "/usr/bin/vd", line 6, in <module>
>       visidata.main.vd_cli()
>       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>   AttributeError: 'function' object has no attribute 'vd_cli'
> 
> This bug was probably introduced with the recent 3.0.2-1 update.
> I couldn't find any upstream issues so I assume it's a packaging problem.

This is likely a bug in upstream, although I did not see any related 
issue: installing version 3.0.2 from PyPI in a venv shows the same buggy 
behavior.

> The file /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/visidata/main.py
> does have a 'vd_cli' method, so I'm not sure what's going on.

I think it's a symbol shadowing issue.
The `main` symbol is resolved as the `main` function from `random`.
One can observe this as follows:

$ python
 >>> import visidata.main
 >>> type(visidata.main)
<class 'function'>
 >>> import inspect
 >>> inspect.getfile(visidata.main)
'/usr/lib/python3.13/random.py'

> Also /usr/bin/visidata still works fine, but I figured I'd
> set the severity to Important because I assume many users
> only call 'vd' and may not be aware of the alternative 'visidata'
> command. Which also makes me wonder if 'vd' could/should just
> be a symlink to 'visidata' :)

This looks like it has been addressed in newer version of visidata, as 
the imports have been reworked (see 
https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/commit/85ddd768258c7dab2c95fa9fc79432e558d0c021).

Installing the new version (3.1.1 as of today) in a venv works fine.

Raphaël