Ansible solution for setting up BESS on older version of Ubuntu fails

[fshahinfar1]

Hi,

Environment setup instruction for older versions of Ubuntu given https://github.com/NetSys/bess/wiki/Build-and-Install-BESS fails.
While executing command below the process is terminated with error:

ansible-playbook -i localhost, -c local env/runtime.yml # if you want to run BESS on the same machine.

Error:

PLAY [all] ***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************

[DEPRECATION WARNING]: Distribution Ubuntu 16.04 on host localhost should use /usr/bin/python3, but is using /usr/bin/python for backward compatibility with prior Ansible releases. A future
 Ansible release will default to using the discovered platform python for this host. See https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.9/reference_appendices/interpreter_discovery.html for more 
information. This feature will be removed in version 2.12. Deprecation warnings can be disabled by setting deprecation_warnings=False in ansible.cfg.
ok: [localhost]

TASK [Install prerequisite packages] *********************************************************************************************************************************************************
[DEPRECATION WARNING]: Invoking "apt" only once while using a loop via squash_actions is deprecated. Instead of using a loop to supply multiple items and specifying `name: "{{item}}"`, 
please use `name: ['apt-transport-https', 'ca-certificates', 'python', 'python-pip', 'libgraph-easy-perl', 'tcpdump']` and remove the loop. This feature will be removed in version 2.11. 
Deprecation warnings can be disabled by setting deprecation_warnings=False in ansible.cfg.
changed: [localhost] => (item=[u'apt-transport-https', u'ca-certificates', u'python', u'python-pip', u'libgraph-easy-perl', u'tcpdump'])

TASK [Install list of Python packages] *******************************************************************************************************************************************************
fatal: [localhost]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "cmd": ["/usr/bin/pip2", "install", "-U", "protobuf", "grpcio", "scapy", "flask"], "msg": "stdout: Collecting protobuf\n  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/6a/b0/ff5e323618006596743060ad48103853b0351cc79f1b84d7f4b247db1149/protobuf-3.12.2-cp27-cp27mu-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (1.3MB)\nCollecting grpcio\n  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/f1/23/62d3e82fa4c505f3195315c8a774b2e656b556d174329aa98edb829e48bc/grpcio-1.29.0.tar.gz (19.6MB)\nCollecting scapy\n  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/52/e7/464079606a9cf97ad04936c52a5324d14dae36215f9319bf3faa46a7907d/scapy-2.4.3.tar.gz (905kB)\nCollecting flask\n  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/f2/28/2a03252dfb9ebf377f40fba6a7841b47083260bf8bd8e737b0c6952df83f/Flask-1.1.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (94kB)\nCollecting setuptools (from protobuf)\n  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/95/fe/2687907be1d6291a84a9b51220595a4f89d9477032c57f21e7c633465540/setuptools-47.3.1.zip (869kB)\n    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:\n    pkg_resources/py2_warn.py:15: UserWarning: Setuptools no longer works on Python 2\n    ************************************************************\n    Encountered a version of Setuptools that no longer supports\n    this version of Python. Please head to\n    https://bit.ly/setuptools-py2-sunset for support.\n    ************************************************************\n      warnings.warn(pre + \"*\" * 60 + msg + \"*\" * 60)\n    \n    ----------------------------------------\n\n:stderr: Command \"python setup.py egg_info\" failed with error code 32 in /tmp/pip-build-cmud1P/setuptools/\nYou are using pip version 8.1.1, however version 20.1.1 is available.\nYou should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command.\n"}

PLAY RECAP ***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
localhost                  : ok=2    changed=1    unreachable=0    failed=1    skipped=0    rescued=0    ignored=0

I guess the problem is with the python2.7 being deprecated. @sangjinhan

Thank you