pip packaging plan

[daira]

I have a plan for improving Tahoe-LAFS packaging:

1. Replace src/allmydata/_auto_deps.py with a pip-compatible requirements.txt file, and change setup.py to parse that to get install_requires, instead of doing execfile on _auto_deps.py.

2. Add documentation for how to install Tahoe-LAFS using pip (still using zetuptoolz), assuming pip is already installed.

3. Add a bundled egg of pip 1.5 (or maybe virtualenv).

4. Change setup.py to add a getpip command: if import pip yields a version >= 1.5 already, this command does nothing, otherwise it performs a pip bootstrap using the bundled egg.

zooko-unauth: I guess, I would be worried about that, unless we had good automated tests of packaging, which we sort of have a little of already and nejucomo sounds serious about improving it.

5. At this point it's possible to do [sudo] python setup.py getpip, so change the docs to recommend doing that.

zooko-unauth: Whoa, what docs?

daira: The docs that we added about pip-installing

zooko-unauth: My main concern about all of this is that quickstart.rst does not get more manual steps added.

daira: quickstart.rst doesn't get updated until the last step, except perhaps to add "if you like pip, here's the doc to install it that way".

6. Write buildsteps to test a pip build and a (prefixed) pip installation.

7. When we're confident that there are no important regressions, make python setup.py build/install use pip automatically (without installing it).

8. Fix any remaining obstacles to ditching zetuptoolz (preferably by fixing those upstream)

zooko-unauth: This is where regression tests would be extremely useful.

9. Replace the bundled zetuptoolz with a copy of upstream setuptools

(unfortunately we can't just delete it and rely on an installed setuptools and still get the required security, I think).

10. At some point in the far future where good versions of pip and setuptools (if that's still a dependency) are widely deployed, delete the bundled versions and make it a hard error if acceptable versions are not installed.

[daira]

On #2055, dstufft wrote:

FWIW pip --no-download is bad and you shouldn't use it. If you want to do that you should download the packages to a directory (you can use pip install --download <directory> [package [package ...]] for that) and then use pip install --no-index -find-links <directory> [package [package ...]].

[dstufft]

Any reason why you want to specify your dependendies in a requirements.txt instead of directly in setup.py? See - ​https://caremad.io/blog/setup-vs-requirement/ It'll work of course, but it's not the main focus of those files.

Is there any reason this can't all be uploaded to PyPI and your quickstart.rst installation instructions be pip install? I feel like there was a reason but I can't remember it now.

[daira]

We don't trust setuptools to put the correct dependencies on sys.path, because of 1246#comment:6 among other reasons. Therefore, we need to double-check them, both in tests and so that we can fail hard if they are not actually met at runtime.

In order to do that, we need the requirements to be machine-readable, and in one place. Currently that place is src/allmydata/_auto_deps.py. However, ideally it would be in a data file rather than in code, just as an application of the Principle of Least Power.

[daira]

I don't see an actual valid argument in ​https://caremad.io/blog/setup-vs-requirement/. It seems to be assuming that requirements.txt would have only == dependencies, but that's not what we would be doing.

[dstufft]

Well that's why I asked about using pip, things installed with pip do not have a runtime dependency on setuptools nor do they use the setuptools egg system. They use plain jane Python imports via sys.path.

[daira]

I must be misunderstanding something. How do entry scripts work in pip-installed packages? They still import pkg_resources, like they do in a setuptools install/build, right?

[daira]

BTW, when I said that we don't trust setuptools, I should have said that we don't trust pkg_resources, since that's where some of the setuptools-related bugs are. (It was all written by PJE which is why I don't make a strong distinction.)

[daira]

More on the rationale for parsing requirements.txt:

We don't want to import our setup.py at run-time because it won't in general be installed/built somewhere importable. Therefore, given the design criterion of having the requirements specified only in one place, the options are either to have setup.py do an execfile on some other code file to get the requirements (as we're doing now), or to have both setup.py and allmydata/__init__.py read the requirements from the same data file -- which might as well be requirements.txt since that has a well-defined existing format.

[dstufft]

So right now entry points if you install from a sdist still uses pkg_resources (sorry I forgot about that case), but there's very little path fuckery because pip doesn't install eggs so in your typical install there aren't multiple versions of things to get the wrong version activated by accident. If you install from a Wheel it actually doesn't use pkg_resources at all (and I have plans to make this the case for sdists as well).

[dstufft]

FWIW I don't mean to keep trying to shove you towards a particular toolchain, I just don't want to see you have to reinvent stuff when I think the problems you're having are solved by pip already (or are on the roadmap to be solved) :)

[daira]

The problem in 1246#comment:6 doesn't depend on eggs. It can happen whenever you have any shared directories anywhere on the sys.path that is before the entry added for some other dependency.

[daira]

BTW, I am a big fan of pip. That's why this ticket is about using it!

[daira]

Replying to dstufft:

If you install from a Wheel it actually doesn't use pkg_resources at all (and I have plans to make this the case for sdists as well).

I'm very interested in this option. Where is it documented?

[daira]

Oh, ​http://wheel.readthedocs.org/en/latest/.

[dstufft]

Wheels are basically a standardized Egg with some of the more nebulous/dangerous features removed. They are a binary format like Egg is. Since 1.4 pip supports them with a flag to enable, since 1.5 hey are on by default. The script wrapper for something installed from a Wheel looks like

#!/Users/dstufft/.pyenv/versions/3.4.0rc3/bin/python3.4

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re
import sys

from pip import main

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.argv[0] = re.sub(r'(-script\.pyw|\.exe)?$', '', sys.argv[0])
    sys.exit(main())

[zooko]

See also comment:13:ticket:2055.

[glyph]

Sorry for the monster comment length here; please read at your leisure, and if there's important release stuff going on, do not feel the need to address this now. I'm trying to collect all of my thoughts about this into one place to leave as few assumptions unstated as possible.

I am trying to understand the desired user experience outlined on this ticket.

Here's the experience I want: as a developer and system administrator, I want to install Tahoe to hack on it the same way I install anything else that uses Python: pip wheel tahoe-lafs; pip install tahoe-lafs. To work on the code directly I want to be able to do mkvirtualenv Tahoe; pip install -e .. This works for all the other Python stuff I work on and use. It appears that if I do this right now (via pip wheel allmydata-tahoe) I get a version that is 3 years out of date which dies with a traceback: distutils.errors.DistutilsError: Could not find suitable distribution for Requirement.parse('zope.interface==3.6.0,==3.6.1,==3.6.2,>=3.6.5').

This ticket seems to propose an extraordinarily complicated way of achieving this result, by bundling specific versions of pip and setuptools (I guess to preserve their present vulnerabilities in perpetuity within Tahoe? :)) rather than having users retrieve get-pip.py et. al. from ​the usual place. Reading between the lines, my understanding of this solution is that it intends to provide a quicker, one-step on-boarding process for developers who have never worked on another Python project, and want to get started with Tahoe without understanding how the packaging ecosystem works. I don't think this works very well; much as the packaging ecosystem needs to improve, it provides a far better and far better-documented experience than the "helpers" Tahoe provides to get you started working on it.

As a user, I don't want to touch pip or setuptools or for that matter a Python interpreter at all; I want to double-click on a mac app and be presented with a UI. Tahoe does not have any build solution for this sort of user right now, so I think it can be ignored for the purposes of this ticket.

Some users may want to install e.g. a Debian package, but that's Debian's responsibility to build, and they have an extensive toolchain that can be applied to anything that works with pip install.

So here's my straw-man proposal:

1. Delete zetuptoolz entirely.
2. Delete all the code in setup.py to reduce interactions with pip and tools like it running setup.py; "helpers" like setup.py trial can be run directly by developers. Similarly, eliminate the "sumo" option; it's not clear to me who this helps.
3. Replace the setup.py with a small, declarative example, something like ​this (ignore the py.test command that contradicts point 2 ;-)), which just says install_requires, and possibly syncs the version or uses something like Brian's ​versioneer. Use entry_points to produce console scripts rather than the bespoke MakeExecutable. To get the "required security" mentioned in the description, don't bundle setuptools, simply add a version check to the top of setup.py and refuse to run with antediluvian versions.
4. Replace half of quickstart.rst with a line that just says virtualenv tahoe; tahoe/bin/pip install tahoe-lafs.

This does leave the issue of not trusting setuptools to put the right versions in the right places on sys.path. If you tell users to create new, normal (i.e. the default, not --system-site-packages) virtual environments, rather than trying (and, based on the long history of painful ticket comments in this cluster of tickets, consistently failing) to convince Python to use a set of modules built into a particular directory as its primary import location, you skip not only all the confusing behavior in setuptools and distutils, but also quite a lot of confusing behavior in Python itself around which directories take precedence under which conditions. Virtual environments provide a predictable execution context which is almost impossible to completely replicate with a Python interpreter environment that has arbitrary other stuff installed in it.

There's also the issue of the console_scripts entry point executable shims not doing the right thing on Windows. I saw a previous comment about it not working on win64; ​this has apparently been fixed. I'm not sure about the unicode command-line arguments issue but ​I don't see an issue on their tracker about it. One of the reasons to prefer this solution on Windows, by the way, is that if you don't have python 3 installed (and the py.exe launcher) then shebang lines won't be honored in .py (or .pyscript) files and they'll be launched with the global python interpreter. There's only one global setting for what runs "Python.File" files, and on my Windows computers it's generally a text editor of some kind, so the tahoe command-line just doesn't work. (For what it's worth, neither does Twisted's, and I am hoping we switch to entry points for this reason as well.)

I did say that this was a straw-man proposal though, and that's because I am pretty sure I'm missing some requirements that Tahoe has. I strongly suspect that these other requirements would be better-satisfied by scripts that sit as wrappers around setup.py rather than trying to burrow around inside of distutils and setuptools, but I'd have to know what they are to be sure of that.

[dstufft]

For the record, I recently figured out how to use PyInstaller? to make a go-lang style single file binary that doesn't require Python to be installed on Linux, OSX, or Windows (and I assume it would work on other OSs as well, but didn't actually verify that). The attempts to make things more user friendly might be better addressed by making an end-user targeted download using that (I can point you to how I achieved it, it's OSS) and then let the pip/virtualenv workflow be targeted towards developers or other "advanced" users.

[daira]

1. The Requirement.parse('zope.interface==3.6.0,==3.6.1,==3.6.2,>=3.6.5') error is already fixed on trunk. (Note that this was due to an incompatible, undocumented change in setuptools and we would have had this problem anyway if we had been using upstream setuptools or pip rather than zetuptoolz. In any case it is fixed, so please do not get distracted by it.)

2. A couple of other difficulties with using pip have just been fixed on a branch, and will be in the Tahoe-LAFS v1.10.1 release.

3. This ticket was filed some time ago, and I know more about pip and its relation with virtualenv and setuptools than I did then.

4. Forking zetuptoolz was probably a mistake, and failing to keep up with changes to upstream for this long certainly was. You don't need to reiterate that; we get it.

5. I've had a migraine today; actually this is the third time I've had a bad migraine after spending the previous night thinking about setuptools/pkg_resources. So forgive me if I sound a bit snappy or irritated.

6. Tahoe-LAFS in fact does have an OS X installer, which will be in 1.10.1. It may also have a Windows installer if that is finished in time. However you're right that it is independent of this ticket.

7. Several issues are non-negotiable:

• We need "download some file, extract it, run python setup.py build" to Just Work, given that Python is already installed. It must not rely on the user performing extra manual steps, especially not steps that vary by platform. (In particular Windows must work like any other platform.)

• The file that the user downloads must contain only source; no binary blobs. It's acceptable for precompiled binaries of dependencies to be downloaded from other sites over https. Ideally this download would be separable from build or install, although python setup.py build should download dependencies by default. (There may be a different download that includes all dependencies, but that is a "nice to have", not a required feature.)

8. We don't trust pkg_resources to correctly set up a sys.path that will result in importing the versions of dependencies asked for in setup_requires install_requires (there are several known cases where it doesn't, and these are not only associated with the use of eggs, nor are they easily fixable given the variety of ways in which dependent packages may have been installed on a user's system). To work around this problem, we explicitly check the versions that were actually imported. We do this in a way that does not involve duplicating information about version requirements in multiple places, and we would not want to lose that property.

[dstufft]

I have a question here:

Why must python setup.py build "Just work" without first installing dependencies required to run that? What (sane) build system has that property and why do you want that particular property?

[glyph]

Replying to daira:

4. Forking zetuptoolz was probably a mistake, and failing to keep up with changes to upstream for this long certainly was. You don't need to reiterate that; we get it.

I was not trying to hammer home that it was a mistake by reiterating it, rather, it seemed as though there are feelings about the continued necessity of the status quo despite its unfortunate nature, and I was trying to dispel them. I get that nobody is happy with the current state of that fork.

5. I've had a migraine today; actually this is the third time I've had a bad migraine after spending the previous night thinking about setuptools/pkg_resources. So forgive me if I sound a bit snappy or irritated.

Somebody put this on a T-shirt. "Python Packaging: So Awful It Will Physically Damage Your Brain!" :-). In all seriousness, I'm sorry to provoke this stress. Please keep in mind that we are just talking about how to make our way to a brighter future, and none of this needs addressing immediately; as I said, if you need to ignore these messages then please do so, I don't mind if it takes you a couple of months at a time to get back to me. If you want me to stop replying and insert the delay on my end, please let me know.

7. Several issues are non-negotiable:

• We need "download some file, extract it, run python setup.py build" to Just Work, given that Python is already installed. It must not rely on the user performing extra manual steps, especially not steps that vary by platform. (In particular Windows must work like any other platform.)

I guess this is the main requirement I don't quite understand. Why is manually unpacking a source tarball such an important use-case? It's not like wget and tar xvzf are substantially less obscure than pip. Also: why is it so important that this file be called setup.py? The general trend in the Python community is to unbundle these responsibilities as much as possible, and to have setup.py serve as a metadata calculator for distutils and setuptools, and other, external build scripts live elsewhere.

• The file that the user downloads must contain only source; no binary blobs. It's acceptable for precompiled binaries of dependencies to be downloaded from other sites over https. Ideally this download would be separable from build or install, although python setup.py build should download dependencies by default. (There may be a different download that includes all dependencies, but that is a "nice to have", not a required feature.)

In my mind, there are three audiences here.

1. There are developers interested in hacking on Tahoe itself, which ought to be retrieved from source control, and then use pip install -e into a virtualenv.
2. There are developers interested in building an application that builds upon Tahoe, who ought to retrieve Tahoe from PyPI with pip install allmydata-tahoe, and ought to be able to tolerate binary blobs for their platform of choice.
3. There are end-users who ought to be retrieving a fully integrated binary artifact (and presently that installer is in a questionable state, so some users may practically speaking want to stick with the pip workflow until it can be improved).

Who is the audience for a direct tarball download?

8. We don't trust pkg_resources to correctly set up a sys.path that will result in importing the versions of dependencies asked for in setup_requires (there are several known cases where it doesn't, and these are not only associated with the use of eggs, nor are they easily fixable given the variety of ways in which dependent packages may have been installed on a user's system). To work around this problem, we explicitly check the versions that were actually imported. We do this in a way that does not involve duplicating information about version requirements in multiple places, and we would not want to lose that property.

Oh, are you literally talking about setup_requires, and not install_requires? That feature seems to be a lost cause :-\. What does Tahoe currently need setup_requires for?

[daira]

Sorry, I meant to say install_requires. Tahoe-LAFS does currently use setup_requires but that is one of the things that has been fixed on a branch: see ​https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/commit/dc04bd2b331a2ba8f2737cbd891b8a9508a10ab9, and #2028 for why we still need a hacky exception to this on Windows.

It would probably be good to insert a few days delay in this conversation so that I'm completely recovered from the migraine and don't have to think about it until then.

[glyph]

Replying to daira:

It would probably be good to insert a few days delay in this conversation so that I'm completely recovered from the migraine and don't have to think about it until then.

Let's call it a week. See you then :-).

[zooko]

Dear Glyph: I'm so glad to have your attention on this issue. I hope you feel sufficiently rewarded for the time you're putting into this that you keep coming back for more.

I don't have a response to most of this material at this point, but I just want to explain "what is the use case" that Glyph was asking about, when he wrote "I am trying to understand the desired user experience outlined on this ticket." in comment:17.

There are at least two use-cases: developer and end-user. The one that I have been feeling like I am the sole defender of during the last seven (!?!) years has the end-user use case. That use case goes like this:

1. You are a non-developer end-user.
2. You read trunk/docs/quickstart.rst.
3. You follow the steps in it.
4. You have a running tahoe-lafs locally.

Because of this use-case, an important requirement for me is that changes we make do not cause regressions in the above process! If a change causes the above process to break, or requires us to add text to trunk/docs/quickstart.rst, then that is an important regression in my view.

For example, if a change that we make adds a new dependency, and that new dependency has to be manually installed (i.e. it does not get auto-installed when you follow quickstart.rst), then that fails this test. If we make a change and that causes the install process to become different on Windows than on Mac OS X, then that fails this test. If we make a change and it causes a working, correctly-configured C compiler to become a requirement for install, then that fails this test.

Now, I'm willing to believe that this has been a fool's errand and a waste of time all these years. I'm kind of depressed about it, to be honest, because I find the alternative of "Tell the user to go find a software developer/operating system maintainer that has done this for them" to be unsatisfying. (For one reason, because that disempowers those end users by making them reliant on that expert, and for another reason, because software developers are people too! The software developer that you find will have the same problems you had, but just more experience at working-around them.)

But, my point in writing this comment is not to argue that this use case is a worthy one, but instead to explain why we've done so much of what we have done over the years, stuff that seems inexplicable if you are unaware of this goal of mine.

[dstufft]

@zooko

So my argument here is that telling end users to install Python and then execute setup.py build is still too many steps for an end user. With PyInstaller? you could add a patch like this for your quickstart:

diff -u a/quickstart.rst b/quickstart.rst
--- a/quickstart.rst	2015-05-06 17:03:17.000000000 -0400
+++ b/quickstart.rst	2015-05-06 17:04:38.000000000 -0400
@@ -17,29 +17,6 @@
 This procedure has been verified to work on Windows, Mac, OpenSolaris, and
 too many flavors of Linux and of BSD to list.
 
-In Case Of Trouble
-------------------
-
-There are a few 3rd party libraries that Tahoe-LAFS depends on that might not
-be easy to set up on your platform. If the following instructions don't Just
-Work without any further effort on your part, then please write to `the
-tahoe-dev mailing list`_ where friendly hackers will help you out.
-
-.. _the tahoe-dev mailing list: https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
-
-Install Python
---------------
-
-Check if you already have an adequate version of Python installed by running
-``python -V``. Python v2.6 (v2.6.6 or greater recommended) or Python v2.7
-will work. Python v3 does not work. On Windows, we recommend the use of
-native Python v2.7, not Cygwin Python. If you don't have one of these
-versions of Python installed, `download`_ and install the latest version of
-Python v2.7. Make sure that the path to the installation directory has no
-spaces in it (e.g. on Windows, do not install Python in the "Program Files"
-directory).
-
-.. _download: https://www.python.org/downloads/
 
 Get Tahoe-LAFS
 --------------
@@ -51,22 +28,8 @@
 Set Up Tahoe-LAFS
 -----------------
 
-Unpack the zip file and cd into the top-level directory.
-
-Run "``python setup.py build``" to generate the ``tahoe`` executable in a
-subdirectory of the current directory named ``bin``. This will download and
-build anything you need from various websites.
-
-On Windows, the ``build`` step might tell you to open a new Command Prompt
-(or, on XP and earlier, to log out and back in again). This is needed the
-first time you set up Tahoe-LAFS on a particular installation of Windows.
-
-Run "``bin/tahoe --version``" (on Windows, "``bin\tahoe --version``") to
-verify that the executable tool prints out the right version number after
-"``allmydata-tahoe:``".
+Unpack the zip file.
 
-Optionally run "``python setup.py trial``" to verify that it passes all of
-its self-tests.
 
 Run Tahoe-LAFS
 --------------

That is, it's entirely possible to generate a single file, that when executed runs tahoe. That single file will contain Python, the standard library, all your dependencies, and tahoe itself. Think static linking but for Python.

There are a few possible downsides to this:

• The single file version of this depends on having /tmp/ mounted without noexec options, if someone has /tmp/ mounted with noexec it will fail.
  • This can be fixed by using a directory layout instead of a single file, this isn't as user friendly because they have a bunch of files they have to copy around, but it fixes the noexec problem with /tmp/.
• You might need to adjust code a little bit to handle being ran from within a zip file.
• It's essentially static linking, so you'll be responsible for making sure that you re-roll the executable if a new Python or library comes out which has a security vulnerability.

This would mean that end users (and your quickstart guide) never mentions pip and the fact you're written in Python is, for end users, just an implementation detail as is all your other dependencies. You can then focus on making pip (and the python packaging toolchain) work for developers and for redistributors.

[warner]

I'm in complete agreement with glyph and dstufft here (see #1951 and my experiments related to #2255). I think we can usefully distinguish between folks who simply want to *use* tahoe and those who want to take it to the next level and hack on it. The hackers can be expected to either know the basics of python hacking, or can be expected to read a second file to remind them of what their options are.

Tahoe's packaging code dates back to 2007, before pip and virtualenv, at a time when setuptools was at best an interesting set of tradeoffs. We began with setup.py build and a Makefile that rummaged around in build/lib* to find the right thing to add to PYTHONPATH. I was eager to make the install process more GNU-like (make install into /usr/local, or make install PREFIX=X to use Stow or build a debian package), and there wasn't really a python-like process to use instead.

These days, pip is well-established, setuptools is healthy and commonplace, and virtualenv is a great tool for providing the sort of isolated developer environment that we need.

I don't feel that download; unpack; setup.py build needs to be the way people interact with tahoe. I'm not even sure what setup.py build is supposed to accomplish anymore: back in 2007 I thought it would create a build/libSOMETHING directory that could be put on PYTHONPATH (but even then it felt weird to parse Python's version just to figure out what the SOMETHING was).

After 8 years, I think we're allowed to change the recommended command :).

As glyph and dstufft have pointed out, our quickstart.rst is in fact aimed at developers: a non-developer won't bother to figure out wget/git-clone/tar to see the file in the first place. The furthest a non-developer can be expected to look is the front page of our website, which should have a pointer to the platform-specific installer or executable (#1951/#182/#195). We can put the user-oriented instructions on the website, and the developer-oriented instructions inside the source tree, and not be obligated to use the same text for both.

There's one other feature I'd like to offer our hack-on-tahoe audience: safe builds (#2055). In particular, I'd like to offer a tool which fetches known versions of the dependencies (identified by SHA256) and makes it easy to build an environment that uses only those bits. The idea is to reduce the reliance set down to the original Tahoe source tree. (pip-over-https is a great start, but this would remove the pypi maintainers and the dependency authors from the set of people who could change the behavior of what you've built). It would require compilers and such, or hashes of wheels, but that's ok for the hacker audience.

This could be a standalone script in the source tree, or an extension command in setup.py, but it should interact sensibly with the normal virtualenv tools. Like, the end goal for a developer is to have a local virtualenv with the right dependencies installed and a 'setup.py develop' symlink-ish in place. You might create this with "ve/bin/pip install tahoe-lafs" (which gives you the latest of everything) or this proposed "misc/safe-install" (which gives you the hash-verified compatible-but-older bits), but in either case you wind up with a ve/bin/tahoe that works.

I have experimental branches in which we put a copy of pip and virtualenv in the source tree, enabling a standalone command to create this sort of environment. But if you're the sort of python hacker who already has them, you can just run your own. My thinking is that our quickstart.rst should point at this standalone tool, with a note that explains that it's really just running virtualenv+pip.

Maybe we need that one-file executable to unblock this. I can imagine Zooko and Daira being more comfortable with making the source tree more developer-centric if they know there's a user-centric option that works. Doing it the other way around might feel riskier, or might feel like we're abandoning the non-developers.

dstufft: could you add your PyInstaller pointers/notes to #1951?

[warner]

Oh, dstufft reminded me to mention peep (​https://pypi.python.org/pypi/peep). It's probably the right tool to handle the "safe build" goal (or may become the right tool in the future).

[zooko]

I really don't like a system in which an operating system priest is required to intervene between the developers who write the software and the users who run it. (Which is different from saying that such intercessors shouldn't be *possible* or *easy* or whatever.) I don't see why the continuous integration server shouldn't build a package on every commit, and that package shouldn't be executable on every platform. Who's in charge of computing technology, anyway? They're fucking up.

[warner]

Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that someone other than us should be building those packages. Our buildbot should definitely be creating them. And then we host them on tahoe-lafs.org . I'm just saying that the source tree isn't the desired executable artifact for this audience, because it's not "executable" enough.

We may need some help from the priests to create the automation that makes the packages (I certainly don't know the windows stuff), but I think we can incorporate that process into our usual CI workflow.

[dstufft]

Yes, for PyInstaller in particular once you have the .spec file written, building a new artifact is done by executing pyinstaller <pathtospecfile>. You'll get a single file that someone can copy to their own machine and it will work, no matter what they do or do not have installed (with the sole exceptions of the fact the file is platform specific and it requires TMPDIR to not be mounted as no-exec).

[dstufft]

And to be clear, you can do that in your CI on every commit if you'd like :)

[glyph]

Replying to zooko:

I really don't like a system in which an operating system priest is required to intervene between the developers who write the software and the users who run it. (Which is different from saying that such intercessors shouldn't be *possible* or *easy* or whatever.)

I completely agree. But, if you want to solve that problem, it's best to address it at the source (work on pip, setuptools, apt, etc) than to re-do the work in each package. Each software package like Tahoe having its own build idioms makes the situation worse because it increases the surface area of expertise that the anointed intercessors have and the plebs don't, increasing the need for them (us?).

There's a deeper philosophical argument here, too, which we should really discuss over some very strong beverage, either caffeinated or alcoholic :-).

I don't see why the continuous integration server shouldn't build a package on every commit,

That sounds like a great idea, and Tahoe should probably have that. Twisted kinda does, and although we don't distribute the artifacts that are created on each commit, our release manager does distribute various artifacts produced by the build system and doesn't build all of them directly.

and that package shouldn't be executable on every platform.

The reason that one package shouldn't be executable on every platform is that a "platform" is (more or less by definition) a set of requirements for an executable artifact, and different platforms are, well, different. Trying to create a combo Mac app / Windows app / iOS app / Red Hat package / Debian package / Ubuntu package all at once is just about as silly to try to make a program which is valid C, Perl, and Python all at the same time.

Who's in charge of computing technology, anyway? They're fucking up.

Oops. It's all of us, right here. Sorry :-(.

[zooko]

I think a good next-step on this is #2473 (stop using setup_requires).

[daira]

Replying to zooko:

I think a good next-step on this is #2473 (stop using setup_requires).

Actually the dependency is the other way around; #2473 is blocked on using pypiwin32 on Windows, which is blocked on using newer setuptools (e.g. the setuptools provided by pip). Fortunately it is possible to solve this ticket and #2473 at the same time.

[zooko]

Replying to daira:

Actually the dependency is the other way around; #2473 is blocked on using pypiwin32 on Windows,

That's #2392 (add dependency on pypiwin32 to satisfy Twisted on Windows)

[warner]

We have stopped using setup_requires=, and we've switched to modern pip/setuptools/virtualenv. So I think we can close this one now. We have other tickets for single-file executables (#1951 for the general case, #182 for mac, #195 for windows).

I want to thank everyone who's put their blood, sweat, and tears into this issue over the last 8 years. Especially zooko, who persevered in his noble battle to improve the state of python packaging (by filing bugs, creating packages, and maintaining entire forks) where I was content to make localized hacks to work around the breakage. And for continuing to fight for the users, not just people who self-identify as developers. I think we're in a much much much better position now than we were 3-4 years ago.