[pywbem-devel] Installability of PyWBEM

[Andreas M. <MA...@de...>]

Hi,
I have recently worked on the installability of PyWBEM.

The command "python setup.py install" either in the "src" directory of your
local repo clone, or in the directory of an unpacked PyWBEM distribution
archive installs not only PyWBEM, but also all of its dependencies for
using it, including Python packages (e.g. setuptools, M2Crypto) and
OS-level packages (e.g. openssl-devel etc.), and it even rebuilds the Swig
tool which is too old for M2Crypto on some Linux systems (e.g. on RHEL 6).

M2Crypto was a particularly complex thing to deal with, I had to create a
fork of it to fix some of its installation issues. That fork is used during
PyWBEM installation. I am working with the M2Crypto folks to get that
solved also in their main repository, so we can get rid of the fork at some
point again.

The installation of Python packages is compatible with virtual Python
environments, it targets the currently active Python environment, whether
virtual or system.

The installation of OS-level packages is done using sudo at this point. I
am still looking for some means to have a choice to also install OS-level
packages in your HOME tree.

The Swig version is verified, and if it is lower than 2.0, it is downloaded
and rebuilt, after its development prerequisites are installed (e.g. the
pcre-devel package). Currently, it then replaces the one in /usr, using
sudo. Again, a more gentle approach would be desirable.

All of this is supported for RedHat-based, Debian-based, and SUSE-based
Linux distros. The packages often have different names,depending on the
distro. I have not yet invested in getting this to run on Windows, but plan
to do so soon.

The command "python setup.py develop" in the "src" directory of your local
repo clone installs everything that is needed for developing PyWBEM. That
is a superset of what is needed to use it, and the difference includes
things like epydoc (including the patches that are needed for its latest
3.0.1 version), lxml, pyyaml, and some supporting OS-level packages
including PyLint. Again, the Python packages go into the current Python
environment, and the OS-level packages are installed using sudo. Some
things that I consider basic are not installed; they are assumed to be
there, such as make, grep, sed, etc.

The makefile has been extended to support this as well, invoke "make" to
get a help text explaining the various targets. (I changed the default make
target from "build" to "help").

-> Please review the src/setup.py file and test the installation approach
for both the "install" and "develop" commands and let me know whether you
succeed and what changes you would like to see.

So far, I have tested with:

Ubuntu 12.04, x86 64-bit
Ubuntu 14.04, x86 64-bit and 32-bit
OpenSUSE 13, x86 64-bit and 32-bit
CentOS 6.7, x86 64-bit and 32-bit
CentOS 7, x86 64-bit
RHEL 6.7, x86 64-bit
Fedora 22, x86 64-bit and 32-bit

It is particularly interesting to run it on distros that I have not yet
tested with. For example, Debian would also be interesting (M2Crypto
requires special treatment of Ubuntu and likely also of Debian); but I
failed to get it installed properly on VirtualBox on Windows 7.

Andy

Andreas Maier
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member, OpenStack for z Systems
IBM Research & Development Laboratory Boeblingen, Germany
ma...@de..., +49-7031-16-3654
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