Join forces with dirtbike?

[ncoghlan]

Rather than collaborating with Fedora on rewheel, Debian created their own competing project in dirtbike: https://github.com/paulproteus/dirtbike

I've filed an issue over there asking what would be needed in order to join forces rather than continuing to duplicate effort needlessly: paulproteus/dirtbike#23

This capability is a "necessary evil" in both cases, so maintaining both projects indefinitely seems like a bad idea.

[bkabrda]

+1, I just learned about dirtbike myself and wanted to propose that :)

[ncoghlan]

I suspect the "not an PyPI" may have had an impact, since dirtbike is pip installable, while AFAIK rewheel isn't :)

[bkabrda]

True, I never actually got around to publish it on PyPI and it remained the same when I transferred it to fedora-python...
Since I no longer have free time to invest in rewheel, I likely won't be able to contribute to this merging effort, but I would for sure love to see it happen.

[dstufft]

If I remember correctly, one of the things was that for Debian, they didn't want to actually re-wheel, because they don't use pip to install packages, so there isn't a RECORD file or anything. They generally have a .egg-info directory which... doesn't list the files by default or a .egg-info file which... never lists the files. So while I think dirtbike will discover all of the files if something was installed as wheel, they needed something that would integrate with dpkg to cover their common case of "we didn't actually record what files we installed in the Python metadata, only dpkg metadata".

[warsaw]

Hi! Yes, apologies for rolling our own. There were various (maybe good, maybe bad 😄) reasons for it, but rewheel dirtbike is serving our immediate needs. I think dirtbike wants to be cross-distro so if you're up for it, collaboration to make it fill the needs of the F/RH ecosystem would be welcome.

[dstufft]

I think you mean that dirtbike is serving Debian's current immediate needs, right?

[warsaw]

Yep!

[ncoghlan]

Ironically, I would currently like to be able to pull the koji client libraries out of the system Python and into a venv (since koji is only shipped as an RPM), but rewheel can't help, since it relies on the Python level metadata, and if I had that, it would be because koji was already pip installable.

So a pluggable cross-distro dirtbike is likely a better general purpose solution, even though rewheel is still nice for the case where you're just wanting to base a venv package on the system provided version, rather than pull system-package-only content into a Python level development context.

[ncoghlan]

(That said, I'm also in a situation where granting the application venv access to the system site packages is an acceptable workaround, just an inelegant one)

[warsaw]

On Sep 05, 2016, at 12:44 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

So a pluggable cross-distro dirtbike is likely a better general purpose
solution

We would very much welcome patches to make dirtbike cross-distro.