Ansible on Xenial can no longer find six_py file

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1

Last I used ansible was three days ago; this morning I attempted to run and receive the following error:

ansible --version
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/ansible”, line 43, in
import ansible.constants as C
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible/constants.py”, line 26, in
from ansible.compat.six import string_types
File “/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible/compat/six/init.py”, line 54, in
exec(open(six_py_file, ‘rb’).read())
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘/usr/bin/six.py’

My current setup is Ubuntu 16.04.2 with all updates as of today. Ansible comes from ppa.launchpad.net/ansible/ansible/ubuntu xenial main. Other version information is:

$ pip show ansible

2

I ran into the identical problem on RHEL7. What I found was that installing the VMware-vSphere-CLI-6.5.0 installed the following files:

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 26 May 18 23:20 /usr/bin/six.pyc → /opt/vmwarecli/bin/six.pyc
-r–r–r–. 1 root root 31988 May 18 23:20 /opt/vmwarecli/bin/six.pyc

There was no /usr/bin/six.py nor /opt/vmwarecli/bin/six.py, so I did this.

$ sudo mv /usr/bin/six.pyc /usr/bin/six.pyc.broken

The VMware CLI still works, and now ansible works again.

$ ansible --version
ansible 2.3.0.0
config file = /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
configured module search path = Default w/o overrides
python version = 2.7.5 (default, Aug 2 2016, 04:20:16) [GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-4)]

-john