Most of the commons python environment has been developed against CPython 2.6. Things mostly work with CPython 2.7 and recent efforts have been made to improve CPython 3.x and PyPy compatibility. We've explicitly ignored anything prior to CPython 2.6 and in fact generally discourage use against anything less than CPython 2.6.5 as there are known bugs that we're unwilling to fix. We've never even tried running against Jython or IronPython so if that's your environment, you're on your own.
If none of this made any sense to you, run python -V. If it says Python 2.6.x or Python 2.7.x you're probably fine.
$ git clone git://github.com/twitter/commons && cd commons
$ ./pants
If you see this error, it means that your installation is attempting to use a cached version of pip 1.0.2 instead of pip 1.1.
Solution:
$ rm -rf .python
$ rm -f pants.pex
$ ./pants
If you see this error, you're running an old pants.pex against a new BUILD file.
Solution:
$ rm -f pants.pex
$ ./pants
If you see this error, you're running an old pants.pex against a new BUILD file.
Solution:
$ rm -f pants.pex
$ ./pants
Almost any problem can be solved by fully clearing out all caches and rebuilding pants:
$ build-support/python/clean.sh
$ git clean -fdx build-support
$ ./pants