[PyKDE] Re: PyQt as a statically compiled shared library...

[Gerard Vermeulen]

On 14 Jun 2005 11:15:47 -0300
Jorge Godoy <godoy at ieee.org> wrote:

> "Truls A. Tangstad" <kerfue+pykde at herocamp.org> writes:
> 
> > So it's possible to create a single RPM usable on
> > Fedora/SuSE/Mandrake? 

Very dangerous. I would never use the same RPM for different versions
of the same distribution.  Well, sometimes you can, but expect surprises:
the PyQt/PyQwt builds depends on the Qt-library (LSB or not).

> >What about non-rpm systems like
> > gentoo/slackware?
> > 
> > (I have no experience in packaging for non-debian systems)
> 
> They can install RPM as well.  There's a package of it for Slackware, IIRC.
> They'll have to worry with dependencies, though.  And this is one of the
> reasons that LSB adopted one standard...
> 
> > > This is a bad approach, IMHO.  It wastes a lot of resources since
> > > the system won't be able to share already loaded libraries.  Besides
> > > that, the size of your programs will also get very big, making it
> > > harder to download...
> > 
> > Yes, I know the tradeoffs, but the most important thing is having an
> > easy install that works for all systems.
> 
> I'd avoid using something like that, unless there's no other way to accomplish
> something that I really need to...  But you have your reasons, of course.
>
I have played with a package as you describe (made by somebody else, based on
SIP-3  and installed in my home).
I had to tweak a startup script to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH before starting
the python script.

The package contains shared Qt, Qwt, hdf5 and Vtk libraries. It relies on
the system wide C/C++/X libraries.  The size of the package is comparable
to SciCraft (somewhat smaller, since it does not use R).

It contains quite a few Python extensions (PyQt, Qwt, Numeric, numarray,
PyTables, .., ..) and the size of the package is 162 MByte.

I think that the package has been built on Fedora/Red Hat and I have played
with it on SuSE and Mandrake.


Gerard