I am also seeing issues related to Python on v0.46.3, which I just upgraded to. I am a Linux user. My IDE setup stopped working properly, e.g. attempts to run a python script in the IDE terminal led to
Fatal Python error: Failed to import encodings module
Python runtime state: core initialized
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'
Current thread 0x00007699a9e47b80 (most recent call first):
<no Python frame>
Following advice from other commenters, I resolved the issue for the short term by running (N.B. I don’t usually have $PYTHONPATH set to anything) unset PYTHONPATH, unset PYTHONHOME. However, extensions are still having some problems. I’ll probably revert.
Importantly, the pyshared/ subdirectory $PYTHONPATH was pointing to (in /tmp/.mount_cursor...[etc]) does not actually exist. I had to unset both variables to restore some functionality.
EDIT: further experimentation showed that unsetting $PYTHONHOME alone was sufficient for this fix to work.