Re: [cctbxbb] cctbx.python unnecessarily unfriendly

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 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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