Details
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New Feature
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Status: Closed
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Major
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Resolution: Fixed
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proton-0.7
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None
Description
Include a setup.py that can be used to upload/download the python bindings from PyPi.
Rational: This feature would allow our python bindings to properly integrate with python virtual environments such as virtualenv. virtualenv allows a developer to override the python packages installed on their system. virtualenv works with pip to fetch python packages from repositories such as PyPi, allowing a developer to create a custom python environment that can be used for developing and testing python applications.
Since we currently lack an easy method for providing the python bindings via PyPi, virtual environments cannot include proton python bindings, as the site-packages installed on the 'real' system are not available in the virtual environment by default.
However, system libraries, such as libproton, are able to be referenced by the virtual environment by default. Given that, this new setup.py should only need to install the python files that live under site-packages. Specifically, only the proton.py, cproton.py, and the _cproton.so files need to be provided. The setup.py should be written to actually include the swig-generated C source, and build _cproton.so from it as part of the install into the target environment.
Since only the python-specific files are provided, and the swig-generated C code must be built on the target machine, the setup.py will assume that the developer has already installed the proton libraries and header files on the target machine. To be clear: this feature will still require proton to be installed on the developer's machine - it merely allows the python bindings to then be installed into a virtual python site-packages via pip/PyPi.
See https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/index.html for more details regarding virtual environments.