Problems with Python bindings in KF5

[Luca Beltrame]

(CC'ed to the author of the bindings)

Hello,

There are a few problems with the KF5 Python bindings, which emerged when 
people (including but not limited to myself) wanted to package them.

First of all, they are untestable in anything that's not a Debian based 
distro, because they don't look for the right version of clang (unless you're 
on Ubuntu or Debian, of course). D5291, D5290 and D5289 solve this issue. 

Second, some of the builds of these bindings (ki18n in particular) are half 
broken: they're prone to races, sometimes they build, and on the next try they 
don't.  Even make -j1 is sometimes not enough[1].

This problem was also posted to release-team[2]. 

In addition, there's no form of dependency tracking in CMakeLists.txt, meaning 
that if you build bindings that rely on other bindings being there (for their 
.sip files) you might get confusing build errors.

But, you say, the CI is green, so they should be OK, right? 

No, the CI  *is not testing them*. They're not getting built because of lack 
of dependencies. I filed a ticket but it's tricky to add them to the CI image 
due their reliance on clang and their requirement of clang >= 3.8.

So, we have code committed:

- that only builds on Debian/Ubuntu unless ECM is patched;
- that is prone to build races;
- that is not even tested in our own CI.

The conclusions are left as an exercise to the reader.

[1] https://build.opensuse.org/build/
home:luca_b:branches:KDE:Unstable:Frameworks/openSUSE_Factory/x86_64/ki18n/
_log
[2] https://marc.info/?t=149108102300001&r=1&w=2

-- 
Luca Beltrame - KDE Forums team
GPG key ID: A29D259B
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 488 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-frameworks-devel/attachments/20170415/6d3974f4/attachment.sig>