Pyinstaller with Wine

[mattmull42]

Hi,

First of all thank you for Pyinstaller.
I am using it through Wine to get a Windows executable.

However I recently came upon a crash during Pyinstaller's execution where it wants to access the function ucrtbase.dll.crealf, which Wine does not implement, thus the crash.

On Pyinstaller's side the crash appears to happen in PyInstaller\isolated\_parent.py, line 322, in call with the error:
PyInstaller.isolated._parent.SubprocessDiedError: Child process died calling discover_hook_directories() with args=() and kwargs={}. Its exit code was 2147483904.

I am using Pyinstaller 6.12.0 and pyinstaller-hooks-contrib 2025.1 (all up to date) on Python 3.12.9.
I tried downgrading Pyinstaller, pyinstaller-hooks-contrib and Python itself to earlier versions but without success.

This problem seems related to #8886 but this time the error is elsewhere on Pyinstaller's side.

Thank you very much!

[rokm]

This problem seems related to https://github.com/orgs/pyinstaller/discussions/8886 but this time the error is elsewhere on Pyinstaller's side.

It's the same kind of problem, yes. You have a package that calls ucrtbase.dll.crealf upon being imported, and that crashes python interpreter under Wine.

Except in your case, the crash happens earlier, during hook directory discovery - presumably because the offending package provides pyinstaller40:hook-dirs entry-point and therefore we try to import and execute it.

You will have to identify the package (try looking at the metadata directories for entry_points.txt that contain pyinstaller40), and if you don't need it, remove it. If you do need it, then you won't be able to build under Wine, because the import will also happen during analysis and prior to binary dependency analysis.

[mattmull42]

Thank you for your answer.

As a baseline I tried to compile a python file containing only print("Hello world") (so one line, no imports) with the command:
wine $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/users/mullemat/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python312/Scripts/pyinstaller.exe main.py

It fails with the same error (but works with pyinstaller on Ubuntu).
At this point I am wondering if the problem is not coming from Wine itself, this is the only tool I have not downgraded (nor updated, I use the up to date version on Ubuntu's repo).
However, the fact that is worked perfectly last year is weird.

I will try changing wine versions and update this thread in case anybody is in a similar situation.

[rokm]

As a baseline I tried to compile a python file containing only print("Hello world") (so one line, no imports) with the command: wine $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/users/mullemat/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python312/Scripts/pyinstaller.exe main.py

If you are using the same python environment as before, that is not really a baseline. Because PyInstaller discovers entry-points installed in your environment before starting the analysis; i.e., that import happens regardless of what your code is, as long as the offending package is installed in your python environment.

You can try listing the available entry-points with the following snippet:

from PyInstaller.compat import importlib_metadata

entry_points = importlib_metadata.entry_points(group='pyinstaller40', name='hook-dirs')
entry_points = sorted(entry_points, key=lambda x: x.module.startswith("_pyinstaller_hooks_contrib"))

print(entry_points)

for entry_point in entry_points:
    print("Loading", entry_point)
    hook_directory_entries = entry_point.load()()

[mattmull42]

Oh I see, you are right.
I tried your code snippet, turns out numpy is the culprit, which is quite sad seeing how common the package is.
From quick tests, numpy>=2.2.2 is broken, but works with numpy==2.2.1.

As a workaround I will just use numpy==2.2.1 for my Windows project.

Many thanks for you help!

[rokm]

FWIW, it looks like implementation of crealf and cimagf was recently added to Wine, and should be available in Wine >= 10.1.