Identify SSH client for deployment about robotpy-wpilib

[virtuald]

@Twinters007 this is the problem I was mentioning earlier

[PeterJohnson]

Why can't we just use pscp (and plink for running remote shell commands)?

[virtuald]

Ha. I haven't used Windows in so long, that I forgot about those.

[computer-whisperer]

What about some form of rsync? I have found that scp can be rather inefficient when copying large numbers of small files, and when you are actively developing code for a robot, you may not need to transfer everything. Plus, I just did some tests with the wpilib library as an example, and scp took ~3 min to transfer to a remote server vs ~10 sec with rsync.

Also, here is a native python implementation of it: http://freecode.com/projects/pysync/

[virtuald]

I have found using rsync on Windows is problematic. Also (and this surprised me a few months ago), it requires an rsync binary to be present on the remote machine.

[computer-whisperer]

Does the roborio have it pre-installed?

[virtuald]

It does not.

[PeterJohnson]

The RoboRIO has tar and unzip. Why can't we zip/tar locally, scp the zip/tar file, and run the right remote command to unzip/untar? I would recommend tar as there's some options we can use to only update files that have later modification times.

[PeterJohnson]

For wpilib/hal, we should use the opkg package manager (uses .ipk files which are basically tgz files with a required package structure) to install them on the RoboRIO. For user programs, we can use tar or zip.

[virtuald]

I think I disagree with that -- let's not do more packaging than we need to do. We already have python packages for wpilib/hal/et al. Why not distribute those as sdists, copy them to the robot, and run 'pip install foo.tar.gz' there? This will allow us to also have the installer do things like install utility libraries/etc without extra effort (#6).

Python 3.4 comes with pip preinstalled, so I assume that the python ipk has it.

[PeterJohnson]

Whoops, I forgot that we already had this discussion... been a long week. Concur that pip is fine to use for the libraries after Python is installed with an ipk.

Yes, pip is installed as part of the Python package.

[virtuald]

Haha, I thought we had this discussion, but I too had forgotten.

[PeterJohnson]

Can this be closed? It looks like the install scripts use the putty tools on Windows.

[virtuald]

Yes, thanks. They even work too, I tested it a few minutes ago.