Unable to build Annoy 1.7.0 on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS

[mpenkov]

I'm encountering a strange issue building Annoy as part of a Travis CI job.

Using Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS and gcc (Ubuntu 9.3.0-17ubuntu1~20.04) 9.3.0, I get this while trying to install annoy via pip:

Python 3.6.8
Collecting annoy
Downloading annoy-1.17.0.tar.gz (646 kB)
Building wheels for collected packages: annoy
Building wheel for annoy (setup.py): started
Building wheel for annoy (setup.py): finished with status 'error'
...
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc: error: unrecognized command line option '-std=c++14'
error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1

This seems extremely strange to me, as the version of gcc I'm using (9.3.0) should definitely support -std=c++14. I'm out of ideas - is this something that has been reported before?

Here's the full output of our failing build, in case it contains useful info that I neglected to include directly here.

[mpenkov]

We figured out the cause, the build was running inside another container running an older version of gcc.

[bikegirl]

How was this issue solved? Can you elaborate more, I am also having the same error.

[mpenkov]

It was over a year ago, so I can't remember all the details, but long story short: There were several layers of Docker involved (yuck...), and we thought the build was running inside one container, when it was running in another (older) one deeper down the rabbithole.

[dyuan1111]

Look through all answers regarding this and the consensus is that it is due to the old version of gcc. I am not a root user thus cannot upgrade gcc. However, I found that installing annoy through conda-forge instead of pip successfully installed annoy.

conda install conda-forge::python-annoy