Shotgrid Desktop 1.6.1 issues with older softwares + Accent encoding issues

Hi,
We’ve noticed an issue in regards to the latest version of Shotgrid Desktop causing previous versions of apps to not display the Shotgun menus.
It seems like it’s only using Python3, not being able to switch to a Python 2.7 Venv. This is the case since 1.6.1.
For instance, in Maya 2018, we’re now getting the following issue :
# Error: Shotgun: Could not start engine: DistutilsMetaFinder instance has no attribute 'find_module' #
That error is caused by the change of “import” form Python 2 to 3 and we’re getting this on all apps that use a Python 2 engine.
We can’t reproduce this issue on versions of the software that are using Python 3 (e.g. Maya 2022). So this issue clearly stems from Python3 scripts being called in a Python2 environment.

We’ve also experience another issue in terms of launching software from the Desktop App : if the user has the character “é” in their name, it won’t be able to parse/launch the software as, somehow, the byte was encoded in Latin-1 instead of UTF-8 (which supports “é”). Therefore, something is weird in the byte encryption on your website. A workaround we found so far is to replace the letters on the accounts on your website, but as a company with multiple users having characters like this in their name, it is problematic.
Edit : We could repro the issue on a station that has 1.5.7.

What can we do to fix these issues?

Thanks!

Hi Axel,

first off, if you have support related queries, make a support ticket.

This is just the community forum.

As a suggestion, have you tried running with v1.7.2 or v1.7.3 of SG desktop?
And setting the python environment to python 2 using the SHOTGUN_PYTHON_VERSION env variable?

Thanks for the heads up. I will open a ticket.
We haven’t tried 1.7.2 yet but we did change the env var of SHOTGUN_PYTHON_VERSION to give it a try and we would be stuck to the same issue.

Best to try updating to v1.7.2 as some of the desktop code is updated regardless and may be causing issues with a release that far back.