Packaging for Windows

[McSinyx]

I am currently only have GNU/Linux installed on my machine. If you wanna help out, please leave a comment.

The process is as simple as python setup.py bdist_wheel. The real challenge lies on how to install all the dependencies (alure and the libraries it depends on) with environmental variables correctly configured to get our little Cython module to compile.

Edit: distribution for macOS has its own tracker at GH-63 now. Irrelevant comments are now hidden to make the thread easier for guests to follow.

[McSinyx]

For the build process check out cibuildwheel which will also handle multiple Python versions (and manylinux, see #3). We will still need Windows and macOS for local testing tho.

It is common practice on these two OSes to bundle the shared libraries along with the package (how irony). These include:

• openal-soft
• libogg and/or (preferably?) libvorbis
• opusfile
• libsndfile
• and of course alure

The best example I can think of at the moment are pygame and pyGLFW.

[McSinyx]

This might also help: https://github.com/cython/cython/wiki/CythonExtensionsOnWindows

[yoyonel]

Docker images can be a good alternative to packaging/building all dependencies on all platforms.

[McSinyx]

@yoyonel, thank you for paying attention to this issue. Could you please elaborate on how Docker can be used to build native wheel on either macOS or Windows? I don't really have much experience with Docker containing non-GNU platform.

[Huy-Ngo]

Also, are you sure that 7z is installed on Appveyor VM? I had to use zip to unzip it iirc.

[McSinyx]

I'm glad that you got some of your own findings 😃

Since I'm not on Windows, I can only answer based on the output of appvoyer:

1. Alure builds and installed alright, and our setup.py can discover it just fine, however palace.cpp cannot be compiled since MSVC doesn't like something about it.
2. Not sure what you did exactly but the install script in .appvoyer.yml should be able to be reproduced on cmd (not powershell, could be but I almost copied from alure's config and didn't bother to change it, you can if you want to though), with %APPVEYOR_BUILD_FOLDER% replaced by the cwd.
3. Codecs are not installed in the script. I have a wild imagination that they can be downloaded an unpacked just like openal-soft, but you have to verify that lol. Anyway it's more important to get palace to compiled, since at least mp3 and flac are covered by alure. Not saying you cannot work on both at the same time.
4. 7zip is sure available, because the build success (see the log linked above).
5. The build_script: echo py -3 -m cibuildwheel --output-dir wheelhouse is a place-holder, since I don't know how to skip the build stage. The build command we're aiming for is py -3 -m cibuildwheel --output-dir wheelhouse (without the echo).

[McSinyx]

Discussion moved to the mailing list.