TypeError when checking FreeType version

[hugovk]

After PR #5098:

$ python
Python 3.9.4 (default, Apr 20 2021, 15:51:38) 
[GCC 10.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import PIL.ImageFont
>>> PIL.ImageFont.FreeTypeFont()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/PIL/ImageFont.py", line 173, in __init__
    freetype_version = parse_version(features.version_module("freetype2"))
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/packaging/version.py", line 57, in parse
    return Version(version)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/packaging/version.py", line 296, in __init__
    match = self._regex.search(version)
TypeError: expected string or bytes-like object

The ImageFont module tries to be accepting of missing (optional) system dependencies for the _imagingft module. But then features.version_module() returns None, which cannot be parsed as a version, so this dumps a completely incomprehensible traceback rather than what most of the rest of this module does, which is:

Pillow/src/PIL/ImageFont.py

Lines 41 to 50 in 5673090

	class _imagingft_not_installed:
	# module placeholder
	def __getattr__(self, id):
	raise ImportError("The _imagingft C module is not installed")
	try:
	from . import _imagingft as core
	except ImportError:
	core = _imagingft_not_installed()

Originally posted by @eli-schwartz in #5098 (comment)

[radarhere]

I've created PR #5445 to resolve this.

[mohammed70777]

ز

[EllieTheYeen]

I had this problem a few days ago and first suspected packaging to be behind it which I reported and having a better error message there might also be a good thing
pypa/packaging#434

[radarhere]

The plan is for the next version of Pillow to return "ImportError: The _imagingft C module is not installed" instead.