Upload Basilisk in pypi

[ydethe]

Hello,
As a great fan of python and its ecosystem, I was wondering if Basilisk could be uploaded on pypi. It would be great to install Basilisk wit a simple 'pip install Basilisk' command !
But a package called "Basilisk" already exists on pypi.
What we could do is rename the AVSLab Basilisk package into Basilisk_sim (for example) so that 'pip install Basilisk_sim' works.
The imports could remain unchanged.

I already managed to turn Basilisk into a wheel file, and used it in a brand new virtual env, and it works well. I could help to build the wheel file and upload it

What do you think?

[patkenneally]

I agree this would be great. However, the work to do this and maintain it is significant and goes beyond uploading. This is the primary reason we haven't gone down this path; extensive additions/refactoring that would be required by the build system to have Basilisk build, test, an install robustly on all platforms for which Basilisk would be registered in the pypi repository.

So while it would be really cool, I think at this point, other aspects of the architecture are in need of (at least my own) spare cycles. That all being said, I'm eager to hear additional thoughts you have about the possibility 😄

[ydethe]

I would be glad to contribute ! I forked the repo to test, and managed to make wheel creaion automatic in github Actions.
How shall I proceed to issue a pull request ? Do you have some naming conventions ?

[patkenneally]

Hi @ydethe before we can pull it into the repo I think we will need to develop a complete story/understanding of all changes and additions needed to support a complete pypi development, release, and maintenance process. Happy to keep chatting about that, noting I'm only one of many community members who will likely have thoughts.

And do free share a link to your fork here! I'm keen to take a look 😄

[schaubh]

We tried making a BSK wheel to do pip install basilisk in the past. however, the issue is that the compiled BSK is tied to your specific version of python and where it is stored on your computer. The resulting wheel was working if I used a computer with the same OS and python setup. However, if python was installed in a different manner (built in python, home-brew python, python install from python.org, etc.), the wheel didn't work anymore. We haven't found a way around this technical challenge.

Right now we are thinking of creating docker images that users could download to use Basilisk more easily. If you have to compile new module, well, then you need the full source code again...