[aur-general] Advice needed on bundling a specific Python library

[brent s.]

On 05/15/2018 12:35 AM, Simon Perry via aur-general wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm the maintainer of pyfa [1][2], a tool for EVE Online players. I was
> wondering if I could get some advice on how to include an arbitrary
> version of a Python library into the package?
> 
> The problem is that the current version of python-wxpython in community
> has a bug that causes the latest version of pyfa to crash, and the pyfa
> developers have set a hard requirement of wxPython == 4.0.0b2 [3] (the
> issue will apparently by fixed in 4.0.2).
> 
> What's the best or most elegant way to handle this?
> 
> The only thing I can think of is using pip to install this version into
> my $pkgdir and setting PYTHONPATH in the startup shell script to force
> pyfa to use the bundled version. However, I'm not sure of this and would
> like any pointers or better a better way to handle it.
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> [1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pyfa/
> [2] https://github.com/pyfa-org/Pyfa
> [3] https://github.com/pyfa-org/Pyfa/blob/master/requirements.txt
> 

This depends on if you want user-friendly or more "pacman-ish".

The "proper", "pacman-ish" way to handle it is to specify the explicit
version in the depends array (even if it's not available in the current
repository "snapshot").

The "user-friendly" way is to create a second package, e.g.
python-wxpython-400b2 or something, and make that a dependency. The
issue there is it is a strict requirement of the AUR that you not
reproduce any packages already in the official repositories so that
would not, I'd say, make this a valid option.

However, my PERSONAL recommendation is to just hold out for 4.0.2 and
sticky a comment on your package that yes, it currently fails to build
with the current version of wxpython and that upstream wxpython will be
fixing it in a release coming soon.

You certainly could use a bundled custom pythonpath (*technically* you
wouldn't even need to use pip, and just include a static build as a
source tarball or something if you wanted to remove the pip dependency),
but the problem is once 4.0.2 hits arch repos, you'd have to undo all that.

So, up to you, but I'd recommend just waiting. wxpython's pretty quick
with new releases of revision/branch change releases. The 4.0.x branch
seems to see a lot of recent activity[0].

[0] https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/tree/wxPy-4.0.x

-- 
brent saner
https://square-r00t.net/
GPG info: https://square-r00t.net/gpg-info

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