bundle_builder_toml.py should raise an error to help debug build failures

[Tom Goddard]

Alexis Rohou was trying to build Clipper and an error caused it to fail but that error was suppressed and a confusing later error then made it hard to debug. Below Tristan and Alexis figured out where the error is being suppressed and suggest it should raise an error immediately so the problem can be more easily debugged.

From Alexis:

Tristan (CCed) worked out change that revealed the actual exception. In file bundle_builder_toml.py, after line 788, he added the raises below, which revealed that the exception was due to a missing src/docs directory:

except Exception:

raise
traceback.print_exc()
return None, False

except SystemExit:

raise
return None, False

Hope this helps. Tom is CCed just in case.

Cheers,
Alexis

On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 3:50 PM Zach Pearson <zjp@…> wrote:
Hi Alexis,

I have a local copy of the Clipper repo. I just pulled and tried to build it with my developer build of ChimeraX, which would have worked except I forgot to adjust the version of the ChimeraX-Core dependency.

How recent is your checkout? TOML bundle builder would throw that error if there was no version specified in the pyproject.toml file, or if you have “version” in project.dynamic and there is no version in src/init.py (or if it’s there but it’s not the first uncommented line).

— Zach

On 28 Oct 2025, at 15:43, Alexis Rohou <rohou.alexis@…> wrote:

Hi Zach,

Trying to build clipper from source and at the last stage, packaging, hitting the following error -what do you recommend?

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/Users/rohoua/work/git/ChimeraX/ChimeraX.app/Contents/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.11/lib/python3.11/site-packages/chimerax/core/commands/devel.py", line 180, in _run

unbound_method(bb, *args, kw)

File "/Users/rohoua/work/git/ChimeraX/ChimeraX.app/Contents/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.11/lib/python3.11/site-packages/chimerax/bundle_builder/bundle_builder_toml.py", line 564, in make_wheel

self.build_wheel(debug=debug, release=release)

File "/Users/rohoua/work/git/ChimeraX/ChimeraX.app/Contents/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.11/lib/python3.11/site-packages/chimerax/bundle_builder/bundle_builder_toml.py", line 878, in build_wheel

self.version = dist.get_version()

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get_version'

--
Alexis Rohou

[Zach Pearson]

I silenced SystemExit, which is raised on a compiler error, at Eric's request. I'm not sure what the context was anymore (I should be writing more detailed commit message bodies).

Do you remember, Eric?