bpylist.archiver.CircularReference: archive has a cycle with uid(13) about dogsheep-photos

[simonw]

Aha! It looks like I accidentally installed the old bplist into the same environment:

$ pip freeze | grep bpylist
bpylist==0.1.4
bpylist2==3.0.0

[simonw]

Yes, I just recreated my virtual environment from scratch and the error went away.

The problem occurred when I ran pip install datasette-bplist in the same virtual environment - https://github.com/simonw/datasette-bplist/blob/master/setup.py depends on bpylist which is incompatible with bpylist2.

[simonw]

More from the debugger:

> /Users/simon/.local/share/virtualenvs/photos-to-sqlite-0uGSHd6e/lib/python3.8/site-packages/osxphotos/photoinfo.py(614)place()
-> self._place = PlaceInfo5(self._info["reverse_geolocation"])

And:

> /Users/simon/Dropbox/Development/photos-to-sqlite/photos_to_sqlite/utils.py(91)osxphoto_to_row()
-> place = photo.place

[simonw]

So it appears it's possible for photo.place to raise that exception. A workaround could be to catch that and treat those photos as not having a place.

[RhetTbull]

Ugh....Yeah, I think easiest is to catch the exception and return no place as you suggest. This particular bit of code involves un-archiving a serialized NSKeyedArchiver which uses an object table and it is certainly possible to create a circular reference that way. Because this is happening in the decode, the circular reference must be in the original data. Does Photos show valid reverse geolocation info for the photo in question? If so, Photos may be doing something beyond a simple decode of the binary plist. For now, I'll push a patch to catch the exception.

[simonw]

Marketcircle/bpylist#2 looks relevant here.

[simonw]

@RhetTbull I tried that workaround and it turns out I'm getting this error on ALL of my photos now!

It's weird: a few day ago this wasn't happening. Now it's happening to everything. I'm not sure what I might have changed.

[RhetTbull]

@simonw does Photos show valid reverse geolocation info? Are you sure you're using bpylist2 and not bpylist? They're both unfortunately imported as "bpylist" so if you somehow got the wrong (original bpylist) version installed, it could be the issue.

[RhetTbull]

Did removing old bpylist solve the original problem or do you still have a photo that throws circular reference?

[RhetTbull]

Frustrates me when package authors create a "drop in" replacement with the same import name...this kind of thing has bitten me more than once! Would've been nicer I think for bpylist2 to do "import bpylist2 as bpylist"

[nickvazz]

I have also run into this a bit, would it be possible to post your requirements.txt so I can try and reproduce your blog post?