Meld not launching in Ubuntu

Question

I just installed meld in Ubuntu 20.04. Upon trying to launch meld, I got the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/meld", line 79, in <module>
    import meld.conf  # noqa: E402
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'meld.conf'

After this, I came across this solution where the answer suggests changing #!/usr/bin/python to #!/usr/bin/python2. Upon changing, I got the following error message:

  File "/usr/bin/meld", line 243
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file /usr/bin/meld on line 243, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

The solution for this being given here about the missing line # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-. Now after this, I am back to original error:

  File "/usr/bin/meld", line 81, in <module>
    import meld.conf  # noqa: E402
ImportError: No module named meld.conf

The only thing I have done is making python3 as the default python prior to this.

Answer 1

Having similar problem with Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS.
After some debugging, I realized that I also had meld installed via:
pip install meld
resulted with undesired /usr/local/lib/python3.10/dist-packages/meld folder.

My solution was running (as root):

# pip uninstall meld

now /usr/bin/meld as was installed via:
apt install meld
works fine.

Answer 2

I had a problem with Ubuntu 22.04. Finally figured out that I had both a /usr/local/lib/python3 and a /usr/local/lib/python3.10. The "python3" had a dist-packages/meld dir and the 3.10 version didn't; in fact, the 3.10 version had nothing in it. So I moved the python3.10 dir to python3.10.save and then did "sudo ln -s python3 python3.10" and after that all was good. I had built from source (I wanted the latest version and why it was in /usr/local), so I'll guess there is an error in the build files for meld.