Generate gridpack from cards not working, especially for cards from Open Data portal

[mitark]

If creating a gridpack from cards on the Open Data portal (used for example this dataset) the generation script fails on ninja installation:

$ ./gridpack_generation.sh ZZZJets_5f_NLO test/ZZZJets . "local" "ALL" slc7_amd64_gcc700 CMSSW_10_6_30

........

Installing tool 'ninja'...
    > Follow the installation progress by running the command below in a separate terminal)
    > tail -f /afs/cern.ch/user/m/mtarkkal/private/gridgen/genproductions_scripts/bin/MadGraph5_aMCatNLO/ZZZJets_5f_NLO/ZZZJets_5f_NLO_gridpack/work/MG5_aMC_v2_6_5/HEPTools/ninja/ninja_install.log
('RETURN CODE AT PYTHON:', 0)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/afs/cern.ch/user/m/mtarkkal/private/gridgen/genproductions_scripts/bin/MadGraph5_aMCatNLO/ZZZJets_5f_NLO/ZZZJets_5f_NLO_gridpack/work/MG5_aMC_v2_6_5/HEPTools/HEPToolsInstallers/HEPToolInstaller.py", line 1894, in <module>
    install_with_dependencies(target_tool,is_main_target=True)
  File "/afs/cern.ch/user/m/mtarkkal/private/gridgen/genproductions_scripts/bin/MadGraph5_aMCatNLO/ZZZJets_5f_NLO/ZZZJets_5f_NLO_gridpack/work/MG5_aMC_v2_6_5/HEPTools/HEPToolsInstallers/HEPToolInstaller.py", line 1863, in install_with_dependencies
    return_code = eval('install_%s(tmp_path)' % target)
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/afs/cern.ch/user/m/mtarkkal/private/gridgen/genproductions_scripts/bin/MadGraph5_aMCatNLO/ZZZJets_5f_NLO/ZZZJets_5f_NLO_gridpack/work/MG5_aMC_v2_6_5/HEPTools/HEPToolsInstallers/HEPToolInstaller.py", line 1006, in install_ninja
    if LooseVersion("3.5.13") <= _mg5_version < LooseVersion("3.6.0"):
  File "/cvmfs/cms.cern.ch/slc7_amd64_gcc700/external/python/2.7.14-pafccj/lib/python2.7/distutils/version.py", line 296, in __cmp__
    return cmp(self.version, other.version)
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'version'
Command "import /afs/cern.ch/user/m/mtarkkal/private/gridgen/genproductions_scripts/bin/MadGraph5_aMCatNLO/ZZZJets_5f_NLO/ZZZJets_5f_NLO_gridpack/work/ZZZJets_5f_NLO_proc_card.dat" interrupted in sub-command:
"output ZZZJets_5f_NLO -nojpeg" with error:
InvalidCmd : Installation of ninja failed.
quit
Process output directory ZZZJets_5f_NLO not found.  Either process generation failed, or the name of the output did not match the process name ZZZJets_5f_NLO provided to the script.

This error also occurred when trying to run in LXPLUS (cmssw-el7 singularity) so the problem is not cvmfs-related.

When creating a gridpack from the test cards provided in the Git repository the script runs, but when used for data processing, the dataset doesn't manage to assign any particles into the event generation. I.e. nElectrons and nMuons are 0 even with a substantial amount of events.