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Guide/Troubleshooting for vendor/build?

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
c, python

Research direction

Start with the README development section and compare it with the commands in setup.py and Makefile. Check the reported pip install -e .[test] and make paths, then document the required build steps, recursive vendor submodules, and setuptools requirement. Done means a fresh contributor can follow the development setup without encountering the reported errors.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

After digging through the source for a while and trying to see if httptools might meet my needs I decided it was time to add a test case to tests/test_parser.py

I was attempting to follow the Development instructions https://github.com/MagicStack/httptools?tab=readme-ov-file#development and got an error during pip install -e .[test].

      httptools/parser/parser.c:1260:10: fatal error: llhttp.h: No such file or directory
       1260 | #include "llhttp.h"
            |          ^~~~~~~~~~
      compilation terminated.

Ubuntu doesn't have a node-llhttp-dev package and node-llhttp doesn't help; that's about where my C build knowledge ends sadly.

I was so confused until I found the vendor directory with some anemic submodules; apparently the --recursive in the git clone step is kind of important 😉 In my case the alternative solution was git submodule update --init after the fact; whoops!

Then I remembered how desperately modern python's are trying to get rid of setuptools:

(.venv) clayg@ThinkStation:~/Workspace/scratch/httptools$ make
python3 setup.py build_ext --inplace
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/mnt/c/Users/cgerrard/Workspace/scratch/httptools/setup.py", line 10, in <module>
    from setuptools import setup, Extension
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'setuptools'
make: *** [Makefile:9: compile] Error 1

... but I eventually got to write my test (surprise: llhttp does NOT allow for non-ascii bytes in header names or values: https://gist.github.com/clayg/174d8e427c4263230b3cdf6591f3365f)

Anyway; would you find it helpful to include some expanded notes/guide/troubleshooting on the build requirements/process (or how to update the vendored submodules?) added to the existing README development section or would it be better to keep that as simple as possible and make a new/different file?

Dominant language
Python
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