Use zenoh-python outside of a venv in 23.04 and later- make it apt installable?

[lucasw]

I'm using Ubuntu 23.04 & 23.10 and pip installs have to happen inside a virtual environment, which seemed fine and good but now I'm running into an issue where a lot of legacy unit tests are running outside of the venv even when initiated from inside, and failing with ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'zenoh' because I made them depend on zenoh.

There may be a solution where those tests can be changed to be executed in the venv, hopefully not requiring dozens or hundreds of file changes to support it.

Probably I can just install zenoh-python into a user directory and add it to PYTHONPATH manually outside of any venv and the tests will pass, and circumvent the new Ubuntu policy, I'll update this if I get that working. (update I made a symlink to my pip installed lib/python3.11/site-packages/zenoh in a directory that was on the PYTHONPATH already and now the tests that need to import zenoh can run, so that is one solution)

Is there any plan to make zenoh available as one or more debian packages, and then they could be apt installed to the system? Though if it were to go into the official package repositories the version would have to mostly freeze for the duration of the Ubuntu release. Ideally it wouldn't be a PPA (which can create the same sorts of conflict issues that led to forcing pip installs into virtual environments) but that could be a good interim solution. Is the ros2 rmw_zenoh work going to put it into a ros2 package and I'll be able to apt install through that?

Being able to build a .deb from source and install it to the system would be preferable to a PPA, I can probably get a basic version of that working myself.

[lucasw]

I didn't notice https://download.eclipse.org/zenoh/debian-repo/ existed before just now, but don't see zenoh-python in it