Build wheels with compiled libraries

One good thing about wheels is that it allow us to embed DLL files. So simply adding all DLL files and making the wheel platform specific would significantly help users by not installing system dependencies. I recently made a PR in cairocffi repo https://github.com/Kozea/cairocffi/pull/164 providing a way to do so. I got a nice repo which builds cairo as a single DLL file so I could do that. But here I couldn’t find the one for Pango ( I don’t think anything else is needed). So, finding a way to build that would be good or rather it can also be taken from msys2 in case of windows and brew in case of MacOS. I don’t about linux.

What I did there was not that correct I think but I don’t know. Possibly there should be a better solution and I started searching for similar libraries. I found freetype-py which had a script to build freetype same thing can be done here also I think. Next, I found  this issue https://github.com/pypa/wheel/issues/128 which is more related and from that thread I found pypandoc where their implementation was very good IMHO, See setup.py. Next, I found this thread at stackoverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45150304/how-to-force-a-python-wheel-to-be-platform-specific-when-building-it. Next, I find another interesting thing which is used with cffi is milksnake which simply suited this one but I haven’t tried using it.

Sorry, for a braindump I thought I would organize it a little better but I didn’t find time.

Finally, the conclusion is there must be platform specific wheel so that weasyprint can simply be installed using pip without any system dependencies.

[liZe]

@liZe I plan to help here.

Thank you!

I think needed dependencies are Pango and Gdk-Pixbuf right?

The libraries directly used by WeasyPrint in master are Pango and some of its dependencies:

• PangoFT2 (independent DLL generated by Pango, for FreeType support),
• HarfBuzz,
• FontConfig,
• GObject.

the DLL files are name as CORE_MANIM_*.dll to avoid DLL hell

I’m really scared of adding a way to specify custom DLL names in WeasyPrint, because I’m afraid that it will add another configuration layer and cause bugs with a more complex way to debug. If it’s only done in the wheel (with specific code in the building script), then why not.

I need to look into Gdk-Pixbuf though, it also uses meson so it should be easy to compile it using meson. Thoughts?

Gdk-Pixbuf is not needed anymore 😉.

[liZe]

So I think there is no compiling work, everything you want is ready in the other repo. It should be just about getting those and package it properly. I think it should need a setup.py to do so. I will work this week 😃

We’ve worked hard to remove setup.py, so it would be a good idea to find a solution without it 😉.