ete4 Windows Install Error: KeyError 'HOME'

[Anthony-J-G]

Hi all!

Was trying to mess around with using the package inside of a fresh version of Windows 11 and a virtual environment generated via (Python 3.13.0)

python -m .venv venv

While trying to simply import the install that I got via pip install https://github.com/etetoolkit/ete/archive/ete4.zip earlier today,

from ete4 import Tree

I was met with a KeyError.

It was complaining specifically that File c:\<path-to-project>\.venv\Lib\site-packages\ete4\smartview\renderer\layouts\ncbi_taxonomy_layouts.py:7 was throwing a KeyError specifically in the line

return os.environ.get(xdg_var, os.environ['HOME'] + default) + '/ete'

after calling the function

def ete_path(xdg_var, default)

According to a little bit of research that I found on stack overflow it seems like this is an issue with differences between the Windows and Linux filesystem. After following the advice on stack overflow and manually changing ete_path(xdg_var, default) to be,

# Helper function to define global ETE_* variables.
def ete_path(xdg_var, default):
    return os.environ.get(xdg_var, os.path.expanduser('~') + default) + '/ete'

things seem to be working as normal.

Now I did a very minimal amount of effort to try to fix this so I'm very unsure if this is a breaking change across other files but I haven't hit any yet. Wanted to bring this up however to see if this was a common problem or something that you guys were aware about.

Thanks in advance for your time, cheers!