Kivy installation on RHEL8 (Beta)

[Bryce Hill]

Hi All, 

Question:

Why does kivy installation fail without having SDL2 installed? Is there a workaround when SDL2 is not available?

From https://kivy.org/doc/stable/installation/installation.html, "If you want to enable features like windowing ... we recommend SDL2". I take that to mean it is optional. However, currently I cannot get kivy to install without SDL2. 

My Setup:

I am attempting to get Kivy installed on a RHEL 8 Beta machine. When I run the following command 

`pipenv install kivy` 

I get the following error:

    'WARNING: A problem occurred while running pkg-config --libs --cflags sdl2 

     SDL2_ttf SDL2_image SDL2_mixer (code 1)', '  ', '  b"Package sdl2 was not 

     found in the pkg-config search path.\\nPerhaps you should add the directory 

     containing `sdl2.pc\'\\nto the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment 

     variable\\nPackage \'sdl2\', required by \'virtual:world\', not 

     found\\nPackage \'SDL2_ttf\', required by \'virtual:world\', not 

     found\\nPackage \'SDL2_image\', required by \'virtual:world\', not 

     found\\nPackage \'SDL2_mixer\', required by \'virtual:world\', not 

     found\\n"', '

The obvious solution is to install SDL2 but it doesn't seem to exist for RHEL8 Beta and the python package is only for 32 bit installs. I have successfully been running Kivy on CentOS 7 but it has an SDL2 package available. 

Thanks!