Installing Lasagna on Mac OS X El Capitan‎

[Tom Arjannikov]

Hi All,

I am curious to try out Lasagne, so I followed the installation instructions. After updating to the latest Theano and running the suggested command (preceded with "sudo -H") I got the following error. 

----- CUT HERE -----

$ sudo -H pip install https://github.com/Lasagne/Lasagne/archive/master.zip

Collecting https://github.com/Lasagne/Lasagne/archive/master.zip

  Downloading https://github.com/Lasagne/Lasagne/archive/master.zip (183kB)

    100% |################################| 184kB 1.0MB/s

    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:

    Traceback (most recent call last):

      File "<string>", line 20, in <module>

      File "/tmp/pip-qkoxokfh-build/setup.py", line 16, in <module>

        CHANGES = open(os.path.join(here, 'CHANGES.rst')).read()

      File "//anaconda/lib/python3.4/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode

        return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]

    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 243: ordinal not in range(128)

    ----------------------------------------

----- CUT HERE -----

The problem is with contributor names in CHANGE.rst, they include extended ASCII characters, obviously beyond range(128). Replacing the problematic characters in CHANGE.rst fixed the problem.

I am not sure whether the problem is with my (fresh) python install or something else... Either way, the install did not work "out of the box", and needed some tweaking.

Regards,

Tom

[Sander Dieleman]

Sorry about this! This is a known issue: https://github.com/Lasagne/Lasagne/issues/463

A workaround is also mentioned there. But we should really just implement a workaround in the library itself so people don't have to worry about it.

Sander