Gramps Cannot Find Sqlite

Help
1

I have installed Gramps 5.2.3 from source in Linux From Scratch 12.0, apparently without errors. However I’m unable to load any databases, as the About info reports sqlite: not found. This is odd as sqlite is installed as part of the LFS build, and is working at the command line.

Attempting to load a database, the error report shows:

15527: ERROR: dbloader.py: line 107: can't load database backend: 'sqlite'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/gramps/gui/dbloader.py", line 188, in read_file
    db = make_database(dbid)
         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/gramps/gen/db/utils.py", line 93, in make_database
    raise Exception("can't load database backend: '%s'" % plugin_id)
Exception: can't load database backend: 'sqlite'

Any help really appreciated.

2

According to Perplexity, Gramps does not explicitly package its own version of SQLite. Instead, it relies on the SQLite library that comes with Python. This is because SQLite is included in Python’s standard library, so any Python installation that Gramps uses will have SQLite available.

So if SQLite is reported to be missing, I would start by troubleshooting the Python installation.

Gramps “About” on Fedora reports these versions:

GRAMPS: 5.2.3 
Python: 3.11.6 
BSDDB: 6.2.9 (5, 3, 28) 
sqlite: 3.40.0 (2.6.0)
3

I know nothing about this particular Linux, but when I install a new Linux here, I always try to install the Gramps version that they have in their repository, which is often a some version from the 5.1 range. And the reason that I do that is that in such an official installation, the dependencies are also installed, so that the link between Python3 and SQLite is available too.

This approach makes upgrading to 5.2, from source, or from a package that we distribute ourselves, a lot easier.

Note that, even if you follow this path, add-ons may trigger other errors or warnings, because they depend on tools that are not needed by the standard package.

4

You will also need to install the python sqlite3 module.

1 Like
5

Thanks for the suggestions. It was as you surmised to do with the Python installation. For some reason I can’t now recall, I obviously installed Python before SQLite. Reinstalling SQLite THEN Python has fixed the problem.

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