byteplay ok on linux

Oh my but this was a strenuous afternoon. I believe I shall now drone on about my adventures, just because the story ends well.

First, I installed Ubuntu 14.04LTS on my 64-bit dev virtual machine. I kind of hated to do this because the install ISO does not offer what to a Mac user is the sensible choice, of reinstalling the OS without changing the user files. Nope. Either it will install "beside" the existing system, meaning in a different disk partition, or it installs "over" the existing system which wipes all your user files and settings. So I did the latter, knowing full well I would have to reinstall all my dev tools and dependencies.

In a month or two I will need to install Py/Qt5.6 and some Python modules, so I can upgrade PPQT and Cobro. But for the time being, I only needed to get a working Wing IDE and Python 3.5. The Wing IDE is a simple install, then activate with my license key.

Python.org does not offer an installable package for Linux. There are Ubuntu/Debian packages for Python 2.7 and for Python 3.4, but I needed 3.5. The only way to get that is by downloading the source package and making it. Well, I've done that often enough. Download, unzip, make, make test, sudo make install. All seems to go well until I try to start Wing, and it can't start Python. "Missing module _struct".

DuckDuck that phrase and you will find that hundreds of people have encountered it. What does it mean? It can be properly translated as, "you suck at installing software". Something didn't go well in the make-install step. More missing things show up when I find out that neither pip nor easy-install were installed. When I try to download and run get-pip.py, it fails with an error because the SSL lib wasn't installed, and also the zlib was not installed.

Scrolling back in the make output I find a list of modules that it couldn't locate. Did it put the list at the end where a person would notice it? Of course not! It buried it between a couple of hundred lines of output before and after. Did it tell you what to do? Of course not! Well, it did; it helpfully advised that you "look for the name of the missing module in setup.py".

Which I did, and saw where it built a list of libraries to search for things. Then I got a terminal window and used the find command to find the things it was not finding. Oh, there they are, in a special 64-bit library. Add the path to that library to the code of setup.py and rerun the make install. OK then! Now I've got pip, and Wing is working, whee.

So now I can attempt what I set out to do a couple hours earlier, pip install byteplay3. Which of course fails with an obscure message, "Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement". What requirement? Back to DuckDuckGo. Oh yeah, plenty of people were having this problem a couple years ago, when pip began to require version numbers that complied with PEP400. I read PEP400. No, my version number fits the pattern. But in one of these postings I see a remark that, oh, also, pip does not support modules that are not hosted directly at PyPi. A module hosted at github, for example. Oh. Which I am doing.

So I find out about setup.py's build and sdist and upload commands. And find out the hard way, that you can't do

python setup.py sdist
python setup.py upload

oh no no no! You have to do

python setup.py sdist upload

all one line. Because...? Who knows.

Anyway, did that, and then in my Linux system and my Mac OS system both I could do pip install byteplay3 and it did it and I could start Python and run the example from the readme, and it worked.

Tomorrow, Windows. I am so looking forward to that.