804105 - Dependency to M2Crypto is hard to install.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Marketplace Graveyard :: Code Quality, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Alexis Metaireau (:alexis)]

Attachment: Patch for m2crypto

The version of M2Crypto that's hosted on PyPI doesn't compile on ubuntu, at least on my plaform, because of some missing headers. 

I fixed that for my particular setup and the way to solve this in my case is to:

- download the sources of M2Crypto: svn co http://svn.osafoundation.org/m2crypto/trunk m2crypto
- apply a patch (attached): patch SWIG/_ssl.i m2crypto-sslv2-error.diff
- install it in your venv, with "python setup.py install".

I don't think this is something that's good to ask the user for, because it's a wrong dev experience. What we did previously for the tokenserver project was to build eggs for each distribution and provide a simple script detecting the platform you were on and downloading the right one.

What do you think? Should we do that also for marketplace?

Here are the files for the tokenserver: https://github.com/mozilla-services/tokenserver/blob/master/ezm2c.py

I would be happy to have others opinion on that :)

Comment 1

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

I don't think anyone else on the team uses Ubuntu or has experience building these eggs so I doubt you'll get many comments here.  That said, I did give up building on ubuntu because of this m2crypto problem so it's an interesting idea.  Are the eggs hard to build?  Are they a lot of work to maintain?  Do they get hosted somewhere?

Comment 2

[Kumar McMillan [:kumar]]

patching m2crypto with a diff sounds sketchy :/ m2crypto failing on ubuntu is a known issue because ssl v2 is not activated by default (or something like that). However, apt provides a working m2crypto package so I think that's the best way to fix it. I do it first with apt-get install python-m2crypto and then you have to build a virtualenv with --system-site-packages so that it recognizes the package.

Comment 3

[Alexis Metaireau (:alexis)]

apt provides a version of M2Crypto which doesn't work in some occasions, especially because they disabled the support of SSLv2, effectively.

So if you need a version of M2crypto which supports SSLv2, you're doomed. I agree, maintaining this with a patch isn't the best way one could think about, but that's the only way I can come up with.

The eggs arent' hard to build, you need some headers installed (don't remember exactly which ones, and that's it). I'm currently hosting some eggs here: https://people.mozilla.com/~ametaireau/eggs/

Comment 4

[Matěj Cepl]

This is completely crazy, IMHO. Install m2crypto from your system repository (all Linux distros have m2crytpo ... e.g., http://packages.ubuntu.com/m2crypto) and if there are any problems with it, file a bug in your distro issue tracker. If required, file a patch there as well.

I would suggest loud WONTFIX here.

Comment 5

[Kumar McMillan [:kumar]]

I agree. I would like to not rely on a custom patched m2crypto for marketplace. If we need to update zamboni docs to explain how to work with the system m2crypto package on ubuntu then there could be a different bug for that.