[Gluster-devel] Packaging libgfapi-python

[M S Vishwanath Bhat]

On 4 August 2016 at 15:49, Niels de Vos <ndevos at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 04, 2016 at 05:47:04AM -0400, Prashanth Pai wrote:
> > 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.
>
> This. We want libgfapi-python to be independent as much as possible. The
> same counts for Java, PHP and other bindings to libgfapi. With libgfapi
> we try very hard not to break existing users, libgfapi-python is one,
> just like Samba, NFS-Ganesha, QEMU, etc.
>
> But we also need to provide RPM packages in different distributions so
> that users can install and manage the packages with the standard tools.
> pip works good for developers and certain environments where versions
> are not watched/maintained carefully. pip may also not be installed
> everywhere, but we would still like Python applications to be able to
> use libgfapi-python. (Many admins are against installing software that
> does not come from the standard distribution repositories.)
>
> Users mostly start looking for packages that are available in their
> distribution. For Fedora they would do a "dnf search gluster", CentOS
> has "yum search gluster" and Debian based distributions use "apt-cache".
> Integration in distributions is important, so that we (and the packge
> maintainers for those distributions) can test the versions that are
> provided. pip does not offer the tight integration with distributions
> that I expect from a stable software package.
>

I believe it is better to provide both rpm/deb packages and `pip`
installation.

I have come across situations where I did not have root/sudo privileges in
the system but still wanted to install some python packages for testing
something. I could create a virtualenv and use `pip install`, which I
believe isn't possible with rpm/deb packages. So it would be really nice to
have libgfapi-python release a both rpm/deb packages and upload the it to
PyPi.

Best Regards,
Vishwanath



> Thanks,
> Niels
>
>
> > 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
>
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