cannot import name 'clitable' from 'textfsm'

[micahculpepper]

ISSUE TYPE

• Documentation Report

Creating this issue for awareness in case folks run into the same problem. There's nothing to be fixed on the NTC end at this time.

SUMMARY

ntc-templates depends on textfsm, which hasn't published a source distribution to pypi in a while. See google/textfsm#65

This means that for users with a build chain that depends on source distributions only (i.e. no wheels), ntc-templates appears to have a bug:

File "/usr/local/Cellar/foo/version/libexec/lib/python3.7/site-packages/ntc_templates/parse.py", line 3, in <module>
    from textfsm import clitable
ImportError: cannot import name 'clitable' from 'textfsm' 

What's actually happening here is that textfsm provides a source distribution only up to version 0.4.1 (2018-04-09) but the ntc-templates code relies on the interface from version 1.1.0 (2019-07-24) which is only available as a wheel. So the way for users to fix this problem if they encounter it is to install textfsm 1.1.0.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

(.venv)  test → pip install --no-binary :all: --no-deps ntc-templates textfsm future six
<output omitted>
Successfully installed future-0.18.2 ntc-templates-1.4.2 six-1.15.0 textfsm-0.4.1
(.venv)  test → python -c 'from ntc_templates import parse'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/micah/test/.venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/ntc_templates/parse.py", line 3, in <module>
    from textfsm import clitable
ImportError: cannot import name 'clitable' from 'textfsm' (/Users/micah/test/.venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/textfsm.py)