The drudgery of PyQt5 installation on M1 for addon development

Anki Add-ons
1

Anyone who had similar experience or I this is my lot in life? I was setting up my PyCharm in my M1 but after running subprocess.check_call(["pip3", "install", "mypy", "aqt", "PyQt6"]) I got the following error. I spent a day already perusing answers in stackoverflow but to no avail. I’m worried this is exclusive only for M1 users.

I’m using Python 3.8 (64bit) version. I’d greatly appreciate any help and guidance.

[ERROR DISPLAY]

Collecting pyqtwebengine
  Using cached PyQtWebEngine-5.15.6.tar.gz (48 kB)
  Installing build dependencies: started
  Installing build dependencies: finished with status 'done'
  Getting requirements to build wheel: started
  Getting requirements to build wheel: finished with status 'done'
  Preparing metadata (pyproject.toml): started
  Preparing metadata (pyproject.toml): finished with status 'error'
  error: subprocess-exited-with-error
  
  × Preparing metadata (pyproject.toml) did not run successfully.
  │ exit code: 1
  ╰─> [27 lines of output]
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "/Users/marc/.virtualenvs/highlight/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pip/_vendor/pep517/in_process/_in_process.py", line 156, in prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel
          hook = backend.prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel
      **AttributeError: module 'sipbuild.api' has no attribute 'prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel'**
2

SOLUTION:

very simple: just upgrade python to 3.9 (from 3.8)

3

I wrote a reply suggesting this as the cause yesterday when I saw your post, but never hit the Reply button for some reason :slight_smile:

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