Re: [Pyode-user] Debian packaging available for PyODE

[Josh T. <jo...@ps...>]

Jean de Largentaye wrote:
> That's great Josh! I meant to do it a while ago, but never completely
> got around to doing it (/me slaps /me).
> I stumbled across a problem when I started looking into it: the Debian
> ODE package has trimeshes disabled because OPCODE has some problems on
> certain arches. I thus had to rebuild the debian ODE package for
> myself and have PyODE build off that... What have you done about this?
> Have you disabled trimeshes in your package? If yes, would it be
> vaguely possible to provide a libode package with OPCODE and trimeshes
> enabled, along with the appropriate PyODE package? Yeah I know,
> "give'em the hand and they'll want the whole arm" ;)

I haven't used trimeshes at all, so I haven't tried working with OPCODE.
 I just let PyODE build without trimesh support to match the system ODE
configuration.

I don't think it would be a good idea for Debian's ODE package to have
OPCODE enabled unless it could be enabled on all architectures, which is
not currently possible due to non-portable pointer usage.  The ideal
solution would clearly be for someone to fix OPCODE for 64-bit
architectures; given the relatively short length of the patch given in
bug 297924 <http://bugs.debian.org/297924>, which changes the ints to
longs rather than intptr_t's as suggested, it would probably not be too
difficult for someone to change the patch to use intptr_t and ptrdiff_t.
  However, I don't have a 64-bit machine available to build and test
such a fix, nor do I have sufficient knowledge about the trimesh support
to properly test the fix.  I'd also prefer not to maintain a separate
non-portable set of packages for ODE.

So the best way to resolve this problem is most likely to find an
appropriate fix for Debian's ODE packages in order to enable OPCODE and
trimeshes in the official package.  Once that happens, I'd be happy to
rebuild the PyODE packages against the trimesh-enabled ODE.  In the
meantime, my packages should build just fine against an ODE with or
without trimesh support, so if you have ODE packages with trimesh
support enabled, you can just grab my source package and build it to get
binary PyODE packages with trimesh support.

> It'd also be really nice to have this package included in Debian...
> have you looked into that possibility?

I'm planning to look for a sponsor who could upload the packages to
Debian.  I wanted to get some feedback from PyODE developers on the
package first, though.

- Josh Triplett