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Packaging Question

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#368 7 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp, python

Research direction

Start with the generated shared-object dependency shown in the issue and the pip/PyPI packaging question. Determine a supported Linux packaging approach for multiple Python versions and how Boost.Python should be handled; done means the issue has a concrete packaging path and its compatibility requirements are clear.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hi all,

I am using a library built on Boost.Python as a dependency for some of my other projects. This library (https://github.com/ompl/ompl) requires building from source and is always linked to the system Python. I would like to make it installable via pip and distribute it on PyPi. My biggest question around this is how to handle Boost.Python. When I look at the generated shared object files, they are linked to a Python-version-specific version of Boost. Namely, I see

libboost_python38.so.1.71.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libboost_python38.so.1.71.0 (0x00007f9d6d9b7000)

I'm wondering what is the best practice for distributing a pre-built package like this? Should I statically link to a particular version of Boost.Python? Assuming I only handle Linux support to start, I don't mind asking them to use apt to install Boost. But, I'd like to enable support across multiple Python versions. If, for example, they are running Ubuntu 20.04, which has system Python version of 3.8, libboost-python-dev seems to install the 3.8-specific version. Would I have to include the entire boost source code and build from scratch when they run pip install?

I'd love to learn by example, but I haven't been able to find any PyPi-distributed packages that use Boost.Python. Can anyone point me to one?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Dominant language
C++
Stars
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Forks
223
Avg merge
11h 22m
Merged PRs (30d)
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