[Gluster-devel] Packaging libgfapi-python

[Prashanth Pai]

Hi all,

The official python bindings to libgfapi has been around for a while now
in it's source repo[1] and the API documentation[2] is also up. However,
it wasn't made available over regular release channels until now and users
had to install it from source (which is very easy[3] for Python projects)

There are few ways how libgfapi-python can be made available as packages over
yum/pypi:

1. Import libgfapi-python repo as a git submodule in glusterfs repo. Modify the
   spec file to create a python-libgfapi package. (Or make it part of existing
   python-gluster package). This way it'll be part of glusterfs release cycle
   and development will continue to happen in it's external repo.

2. Have libgfapi-python maintain it's own release numbers and release lifecycle
   externally. Package it and make it available over pypi so that users can
   simply do a pip install. This will also allow python bindings to work
   with any glusterfs versions or release series (3.7, 3.8, master) which is
   really nice.

3. Import entire libgfapi-python source code into glusterfs repo and deprecate
   libgfapi-python repo. Continue all further development in glusterfs repo.

My personal favourite is to make it available over pypi which will work
across distros but pypi doesn't seem to be popular here.

libgfapi-python bindings has been tested only against Linux x86-64 and Python
versions 2.6 and 2.7 in Fedora/CentOS so far. Niels has setup a job in the
CentOS CI infra that runs ligfapi python tests against glusterfs nightly builds.

Your preference and inputs on how do we go about packaging libgfapi-python
will help.

[1]: https://github.com/gluster/libgfapi-python
[2]: http://libgfapi-python.rtfd.io
[3]: http://libgfapi-python.rtfd.io/en/latest/install.html

 -Prashanth Pai