[Pythonmac-SIG] [OT] advice on distributing for different OSs

[Chris Barker - NOAA Federal]

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 1:23 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:

> It's unlikely that support for external dependencies will improve a lot
> in the near future unless someone does the work and provides a clear and
> usable specification, preferably with an implementation.

well, Gattai may be a good start....

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gattai/

Not sure how much use it's had -- Kevin hasn't promoted it much. But
we're using it for a couple projects...

> A major problem for this is that external dependencies aren't much of
> a problem on Linux, most OSS C/C++ libraries are available from the
> repositories of the major Linux distribution (or add-on repositories). Because
> of this a major group of Python users doesn't notice the problem, and hence
> is less likely to work on a solution.

True, though it's not so much that it isn't an issue on LInux, as that
the distros have built-in tools to address those issues. But same
result.

> IMHO the best way forward is to build a solution for OSX, and only then try to
> generalize that with support for Windows and Linux.

agreed, and maybe not bother.....

It might be worth looking at what Chris Gohlke does -- he builds a
heck of a lot of packages for Windows -- maybe he's got something
that's worth porting -- or maybe porting the API of.

> BTW. There is a tool that does have decent support for external dependencies:
> buildout.

I had forgotten about that -- maybe I'll take another look.

In any case, I think the order of operations is:

1) Figure out HOW we want to build binary packages -- i.e shared vs
static, where to install if shared, etc.

2) Develop/ adapt etc an automated way to build the packages.

3) worry about distribution of packages -- maybe wheels are it, or a
simple binary format like "conda", which looks like it's BSD licensed,
and nice and simple.

I'm still working on (1).... secondarily on (2)

The trick is to support regular install in site-packages, virtualenv,
and "develop" mode.

"develop" mode has me stumped at the moment -- at least being able to
do it in a way that shares dylibs between python packages..

-Chris








-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

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Chris.Barker at noaa.gov