[cctbxbb] cctbx.python unnecessarily unfriendly

Baptiste Carvello devel at baptiste-carvello.net
Fri Jan 10 01:14:33 PST 2014


Hi Marcin,

from what I remember, distutils was not the difficult problem. The
setup.py was mostly a thin wrapper around Scons. As you say, it's just
another build system. The main reason we use it is, that the Debian
packaging tools interface well with it.

The difficulty was in making sure that cctbx would find its different
bits (python modules, shared libraries, runtime and test data) in the
different places where Debian traditionally install them (instead of the
source + build directories). We tried to make this work even when using
the system python.

This involved some delicate surgery in the libtbx environment file. For
this task, a python-written build system is a big plus, because it
enables us to import the libtbx modules.

Cheers,

Baptiste

Le 09/01/2014 20:04, Marcin Wojdyr a écrit :
> In CCP4 we have the same problem that Linux distros have with cctbx.
> We're using an ad-hoc shell script that copies files around as a
> substitute for "make install" (or python setup.py install / scons
> install) functionality.
> 
> Scons like any build system supports installation. From what I just
> googled the functions for this are named Install() and InstallAs().
> Maybe it would be easier to use them instead of distutils?
> 
> Marcin
> 
> On 9 January 2014 08:51, Luc Bourhis <luc_j_bourhis at mac.com> wrote:
>> Hi Graeme,
>>
>> So what would be really cool would be to be able to use distutils methods to
>> *install* cctbx in the usual pythonic way, but to keep up with the current
>> mechanism for *working on* cctbx
>>
>>
>> Actually, thinking about it a bit more, it seems that installing the cctbx
>> with distutils is orthogonal with the way we do it now. I mean, we could
>> keep using the Python wrapper to make the build + source (non-)installation
>> work but then have a script that would create a distutils-based distro. And
>> you know what: the Debian people were working on this about one year ago, as
>> part of creating a proper deb package for the cctbx. They proposed a series
>> of patch to achieve that: if you browse the history of this mailing list,
>> you will find the discussions we had. The Debian developer were Radostan
>> Riedel, Baptiste Carvello and Frédéric-Emmanuel Picca. The last of the tree
>> works at Soleil and his concerns were very similar to those you expressed.
>> He even invited me to visit him, which I did. Unfortunately, neither I nor
>> Nat have followed this project.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Luc
>>
>>
>>
>>
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