Error with compiler while trying to run FEniCS example code

Question

I've just tried to install FEniCS on Ubuntu 16.04 and when I try to run the first example code using python3.5 I get the following 2 errors:

 RuntimeError: Expecting a string or list of strings, not
 {'slepc_real', 'sz', 'mpi', 'mpi_cxx', 'hdf5', 'boost_timer', 'm',
 'boost_filesystem', 'z', 'dolfin', 'petsc_real', 'dl'}.

 RuntimeError: Unable to compile C++ code with dijitso

Has anyone encountered this and managed to fix it?

Answer 1

the problem, in this case, is an old version of pkgconfig. Please update it with the command

$ pip3 install -U pkgconfig

Then, this problem should disappear even without your changes in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dolfin/jit/jit.py