TF installation failure on ubuntu 14.04 - tensorflow

Question

I'm getting this weird config error I cannot decipher. It doesn't seem any other ppl has encountered this. CUDA is correctly config'ed. What is this 'repository_rule' and 'external' package thing?
(tensorflow)weiwe#weiwe:~/tensorflow$ ./configure
Please specify the location of python. [Default is /home/weiwe/tensorflow/bin/python]:
Do you wish to build TensorFlow with Google Cloud Platform support? [y/N]
No Google Cloud Platform support will be enabled for TensorFlow
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 18, in <module>
TypeError: can only concatenate list (not "str") to list
Found possible Python library paths:
Please input the desired Python library path to use. Default is []
/home/weiwe/tensorflow/lib/python2.7/site-packages
Do you wish to build TensorFlow with GPU support? [y/N] y
GPU support will be enabled for TensorFlow
Please specify which gcc should be used by nvcc as the host compiler. [Default is /usr/bin/gcc]:
Please specify the Cuda SDK version you want to use, e.g. 7.0. [Leave empty to use system default]:
Please specify the location where CUDA toolkit is installed. Refer to README.md for more details. [Default is /usr/local/cuda]:
Please specify the Cudnn version you want to use. [Leave empty to use system default]:
Please specify the location where cuDNN library is installed. Refer to README.md for more details. [Default is /usr/local/cuda]:
libcudnn.so resolves to libcudnn.4
Please specify a list of comma-separated Cuda compute capabilities you want to build with.
You can find the compute capability of your device at: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus.
Please note that each additional compute capability significantly increases your build time and binary size.
[Default is: "3.5,5.2"]:
INFO: Starting clean (this may take a while). Consider using --expunge_async if the clean takes more than several minutes.
.........
ERROR: /home/weiwe/tensorflow/third_party/gpus/cuda_configure.bzl:415:18: function 'repository_rule' does not exist.
ERROR: com.google.devtools.build.lib.packages.BuildFileContainsErrorsException: error loading package 'external': Extension file '#local_config_cuda//cuda:build_defs.bzl' may not be loaded from a WORKSPACE file since the extension file is located in an external repository.
Configuration finished
(tensorflow)weiwe#weiwe:~/tensorflow$ bazel build -c opt --config=cuda \
> //tensorflow/tools/pip_package:build_pip_package
ERROR: com.google.devtools.build.lib.packages.BuildFileContainsErrorsException: error loading package 'external': Extension file '#local_config_cuda//cuda:build_defs.bzl' may not be loaded from a WORKSPACE file since the extension file is located in an external repository.
INFO: Elapsed time: 0.380s
(tensorflow)weiwe#weiwe:~/tensorflow$ bazel build -c opt --config=cuda //tensorflow/cc:tutorials_example_trainer
ERROR: com.google.devtools.build.lib.packages.BuildFileContainsErrorsException: error loading package 'external': Extension file '#local_config_cuda//cuda:build_defs.bzl' may not be loaded from a WORKSPACE file since the extension file is located in an external repository.
INFO: Elapsed time: 0.109s
(tensorflow)weiwe#weiwe:~/tensorflow$ bazel clean
INFO: Starting clean (this may take a while). Consider using --expunge_async if the clean takes more than several minutes.
(tensorflow)weiwe#weiwe:~/tensorflow$ bazel build -c opt --config=cuda //tensorflow/cc:tutorials_example_trainer
ERROR: com.google.devtools.build.lib.packages.BuildFileContainsErrorsException: error loading package 'external': Extension file '#local_config_cuda//cuda:build_defs.bzl' may not be loaded from a WORKSPACE file since the extension file is located in an external repository.
INFO: Elapsed time: 0.242s

Answer 1

There was a patch recently to the cuda build layer. Once you get that error
Error loading package 'external': Extension file '#local_config_cuda//cuda:build_defs.bzl' may not be loaded from a WORKSPACE file since the extension file is located in an external repository.
You have to re-run ./configure again to re-create that target.
This can become tiresome and a way to skip through the configuration process is to provide the variable settings from command line
PYTHON_BIN_PATH=$HOME/anaconda2/bin/python CUDA_TOOLKIT_PATH="/usr/local/cuda" CUDNN_INSTALL_PATH="/usr/local/cuda" TF_NEED_CUDA=1 TF_CUDA_COMPUTE_CAPABILITIES="6.1" TF_CUDNN_VERSION="5" TF_CUDA_VERSION="8.0" TF_CUDA_VERSION_TOOLKIT=8.0 ./configure
Hope it helps