shapely and geos break in distance method

Question

I'm having problems using the distance method in shapely (I suspect incompatibility with the geos package).

The following code:

from shapely.geometry import Point
print Point(0,0).distance(Point(1,1))

creates the following error:

python: GeometryComponentFilter.cpp:34: virtual void geos::geom::GeometryComponentFilter::filter_ro(const geos::geom::Geometry*): Assertion `0' failed.
Aborted (core dumped)

I’m running CentOS 6, python 2.6, geos 3.4.2 (although it creates a link from libgeos_c to 1.8.2)

Googling it yielded a few old posts which didn't really help me.

Thanks, Raz

Answer 1

This looks like a GEOS bug (#535). As a work around, try fetching a development snapshot that appears to solve this issue:

svn co http://svn.osgeo.org/geos/trunk@3960 geos-svn
cd geos-svn
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make check

If the last command throws any similar errors, consider contributing feedback to the bug report. But if all is good, then it should be good for shapely. As root:

make install
ldconfig