Changes between Version 3 and Version 4 of Ticket #2729


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Timestamp:
2016-03-26T22:11:41Z (9 years ago)
Author:
cypher
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  • Ticket #2729 – Description

    v3 v4  
    1 I've recently put together some simple build scripts to help automate the creation binary distributions of Tahoe-LAFS for Windows and Mac using [http://www.pyinstaller.org/ PyInstaller]. Like bb-freeze, py2exe, py2app, and other related projects, with enough tinkering, Pyinstaller can be used to create self-contained distributions of python programs that can effectively be run "out of the box" by end users. Given the rather convoluted state of python packaging (and with it, the additional mess of horrors that typically comes with building Tahoe-LAFS from scratch), I think it would be desirable to have such packages available to end users as an alternative to the current offering of a manual install.     
     1I've recently put together some simple build [https://github.com/gridsync/frozen-tahoe scripts] to help automate the creation binary distributions of Tahoe-LAFS for Windows and Mac using [http://www.pyinstaller.org/ PyInstaller]. Like bb-freeze, py2exe, py2app, and other related projects, with enough tinkering, Pyinstaller can be used to create self-contained distributions of python programs that can effectively be run "out of the box" by end users. Given the rather convoluted state of python packaging (and with it, the additional mess of horrors that typically comes with building Tahoe-LAFS from scratch), I think it would be desirable to have such packages available to end users as an alternative to the current offering of a manual install.     
    22
    33The aforementioned scripts can be found [https://github.com/gridsync/frozen-tahoe/blob/master/make-frozen-tahoe.bat here] (for Windows) and [https://github.com/gridsync/frozen-tahoe/blob/master/make-frozen-tahoe.sh here] (for OS X) and are currently being used by Gridsync's buildbot (which follows Tahoe-LAFS' upstream master branch and publishes the resultant binary packages [https://buildbot.gridsync.io/tahoe-lafs/ here]). It shouldn't be terribly difficult to port these over to tahoe-lafs.org's buildbot and I'd be happy to help out with the process (or even lend some buildslaves to it, if needed).
    … …  
    55A few explanatory notes:     
    66
    7 * A ".spec" file is needed to inform Pyinstaller of any required files or modules that might not otherwise be detected by analyzing the package's import statements. The one I put together for tahoe [https://github.com/gridsync/frozen-tahoe/blob/master/tahoe.spec here] pulls in the static files needed for the web UI (as well as the 'characteristic' and 'pyasn1_modules' -- which, for whatever reason, aren't automatically picked up by Pyinstaller). If you use this, the specified filepaths will probably need to be changed.
     7* A ".spec" file is needed to inform Pyinstaller of any required files or modules that might not otherwise be detected by analyzing the package's import statements. The one I put together for tahoe [https://github.com/gridsync/frozen-tahoe/blob/master/tahoe.spec here] pulls in the static files needed for the web UI (as well as the 'characteristic' and 'cffi' -- which, for whatever reason, aren't automatically picked up by Pyinstaller). If you use this, the specified filepaths will probably need to be changed.
    88
    99* The above spec file generates one-folder bundles by choice rather than one-file binaries since the one-file approach will fail if the system tempdir is mounted with the NOEXEC flag (and one-file mode works by extracting bundled files to the system tempdir and running them from there).
    1010
    11 * On Windows, OpenSSL will need to be installed in accordance with Daira's instructions outlined [https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/blob/195.windows-packaging.10/docs/build/windows-installer.rst here]. The windows script will build OpenSSL if run with the `--with-openssl` flag but the other dependencies specified at the top of the file will still need to be installed manually.
     11* ~~On Windows, OpenSSL will need to be installed in accordance with Daira's instructions outlined [https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/blob/195.windows-packaging.10/docs/build/windows-installer.rst here]. The windows script will build OpenSSL if run with the `--with-openssl` flag but the other dependencies specified at the top of the file will still need to be installed manually.~~ (This is no longer necessary)
    1212
    13 * The build scripts patch out the setuptools requirement from _auto_deps.py before running pyinstaller which allows tahoe to run frozen. Maybe this isn't necessary and maybe there's a better way to do it (I do see [https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/blob/master/src/allmydata/_auto_deps.py#L100 some code to this effect in _auto_deps.py]) but I couldn't get tahoe running frozen without patching as __init.py__'s check_requirement() fails with "PackagingError: no version info for setuptools". More investigation is needed..
     13* The build scripts patch out the setuptools requirement from _auto_deps.py before running pyinstaller which allows tahoe to run frozen. Maybe this isn't necessary and maybe there's a better way to do it (I do see [https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/blob/master/src/allmydata/_auto_deps.py#L137 some code to this effect in _auto_deps.py]) but I couldn't get tahoe running frozen without patching as __init.py__'s check_requirement() fails with "PackagingError: no version info for setuptools". More investigation is needed..
    1414                                             
    1515* Pyinstaller builds can be made reproducible (assuming the same platform, interpreter version, and architecture) by setting the PYTHONHASHSEED environment variable to a known/shared value. Note that this only affects the pythonic bits (and not, e.g., the C libraries); given the current dependencies, more work is needed to make these packages fully reproducible (but even so remains a worthy goal).