setup.py complaints / issues about hotspotd

[prahladyeri]

Hey cemeyer,

Thanks for such objective review and helping me improve this software. The reason for this whole mess started when I decided to provide a symlink to hotspotd post the installation:

distutils.file_util.copy_file(loc + '/hotspotd/hotspotd.py','/usr/bin/hotspotd',link='sym',preserve_mode=1)
os.chmod(loc + '/hotspotd/hotspotd.py',0755)

You see, this is very much required otherwise, how can the user run sudo hotspotd without typing the path to entire python library?
Now how do I find the install location (loc variable)? distutils doesn't provide any easy way to do that. Googling led me to these links and I came up with the implemented solution:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122327/how-do-i-find-the-location-of-my-python-site-packages-directory

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6362466/install-python-extension-to-specific-location

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7354096/override-default-installation-directory-for-python-bdist-windows-installer

If you do know abt any way of detecting the install path, please let me know.

The replacement of sys.prefix with /usr/local was done in haste to fix bug#1. I guess that can be undone now.

[prahladyeri]

I was also prodded along by this python doc page that says on all pure unix systems, the install path is gonna be:

/usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages

But apparently it doesn't. Bug #1 arose as the files were installed in dist-packages instead of site-packages

[cemeyer]

Hi Prahlad,

Generally Python binaries whose code lives in site-packages use one of a couple patterns:

• Don't install hotspotd.py in site-packages, instead install it directly in /usr/bin

Or

• Don't symlink hotspotd from /usr/bin but instead create a dummy script that just includes hotspotd and executes hotspotd.main() or similar.

Re: Python doc site-packages link, see the immediately following comment:

Most Linux distributions include Python as a standard part of the system, so prefix and exec-prefix
are usually both /usr on Linux. If you build Python yourself on Linux (or any Unix-like system), the
default prefix and exec-prefix are /usr/local.

I'm not super familiar with Python packaging so I can't help out much more. But this is definitely wrong :-).

[prahladyeri]

Hey Conrad,

Many thanks for the useful suggestion about creating a dummy script that just starts the hotspotd. I came to know that files specified as scripts directly go to the /usr/local/bin folder. Now the setup code has been reduced to just:

#INSTALL IT
from distutils.core import setup
s = setup(name='hotspotd',
    version='0.1',
    description='Small daemon to create a wifi hotspot on linux',
    license='MIT',
    author='Prahlad Yeri',
    author_email='[email protected]',
    url='https://github.com/prahladyeri/hotspotd',
    #py_modules=['hotspotd','cli'],
    packages=['hotspotd'],
    package_dir={'hotspotd': ''},
    package_data={'hotspotd': ['run.dat']},
    scripts=['hotspotd']
    #data_files=[('config',['run.dat'])],
    )

Also, I had considered developing this in C language myself, but went with python for two reasons:

• python code can easily run on multi-architectures without tweaks.
• C seems an overkill (at least for now)
• If at all any need arises for performance, etc. we can always create a C extension or use ctypes in python to call the C library.

Thanks again for your support!

Cheers,
Prahlad

[cemeyer]

Now the setup code has been reduced to just

Great! That looks pretty reasonable.