I'm posting this information to help others who are transitioning from
Python 2.x to Python 3.x and are using Vim and Mercurial on Windows.
BACKGROUND
Old workstation configuration: 32-bit Windows XP/SP3, Python 2.7.6 and
3.3.3, Mercurial 2.8.2, PATH contained Python before Mercurial, dual
boot with Slackware 14.0
New workstation configuration: 64-bit Windows 7/SP1, 64-bit Python
3.3.3, 64-bit Mercurial 2.8.2, PATH contained Python before Mercurial,
dual boot with Slackware64 14.1
Early last year, I ported dozens of Python 2.7 tools that I wrote to
automate various development tasks to Python 3 (via 2to3 script and
testing). After the ports were completed, I had my colleagues replace
their Python2 installations with Python3. We quickly uncovered/fixed a
few issues (mostly related to Unicode) that I missed in my initial
testing. We've been happily running the Python3 versions for months
now, but I've been reluctant to remove Python27 from my old (soon to be
retired) workstation.
PROBLEM
Yesterday, I finally decided to say goodbye to Python27 on Windows and
uninstalled it from my old workstation. A little while later, I noticed
that vim no longer worked. Gvim.exe silently failed and vim.exe failed
with the following error:
ImportError: No module named site
After reading the relevant vim documentation
(http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/if_pyth.html#python-dynamic) and
doing a few Google searches, I decided to run vim under windbg to see
what was actually going on. Windbg showed that vim loaded the
python27.dll from my Mercurial installation just before exiting. A
quick look inside Mercurial's library.zip file showed that the site.py
module was not included. OK, so now things were starting to make sense.
WORKAROUND
I took Mercurial out of the PATH, which returned vim to working order.
I then wrote the following two line hg.bat script and copied it to a
directory include in the PATH:
@echo off
"C:\Program Files\Mercurial\hg.exe" %*
With this workaround, both vim and hg appear to be once again working on
the old workstation.
64-BIT WINDOWS
As the vim for Windows package I installed is a 32-bit application, I
didn't have this issue on 64-bit Windows using 64-bit Mercurial.
However, I believe the same issue would occur if 32-bit Mercurial is
used on 64-bit Windows.
Hopefully this information is useful to other Python, Vim, and Mercurial
users.
Peter Santoro
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