Packaging of asciinema cli

[ku1ik]

Opening this issue to discuss the best way for package maintainers to be notified about new asciinema releases.

We could create a mailing list for this, or use https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema/releases.atom like @jakubjedelsky suggested (asciinema/asciinema#43 (comment)). Alternatively I could be reopening this issue and pinging you here in the comments whenever new release is out. Any other ideas and/or preferences?

/cc @jakubjedelsky @zanchey @Dr-Terrible @larryv

UPDATE: So I just keep this issue open and comment when there's new release. Package maintainers can subscribe to this issue to get notified.

[ku1ik]

/cc @swills

[zanchey]

The atom feed is enough for me. SourceForge used to be the place for mailing lists, but I think they've gone a bit evil now. We have a mailman server if you want to use that.

[Dr-Terrible]

The atom feed is enough for me too.
If by any chance I miss a release and users are complaining, feel free to poke me via GitHub's issues through my Gentoo overlay.

[swills]

Personally, I'd prefer an email of some kind, either mailing list or github issue email, either is fine. Thanks!

[larryv]

I'd also prefer email notifications (to minimize update lag), but I'd be fine with the atom feed.

[ku1ik]

I have just released 1.2.0 /cc @larryv @swills @Dr-Terrible @zanchey @jakubjedelsky

[Dr-Terrible]

@sickill Done! Thank you for the reminder.

v1.2.0 tested with both Go1.4.x and Go1.5.x (Gentoo/Linux x86-64), and everything works as expected, with all the unit tests passing. Ebuild just pushed in my overlay: Dr-Terrible/go-overlay@4859682.

[ku1ik]

@Dr-Terrible wow, that was quick! Thanks!

[ku1ik]

@youtux thanks for updating Homebrew package!

[youtux]

@sickill you are welcome. Also, I use sibbell.com to get updates via email every time a starred github project gets a new tag.

[zanchey]

I've updated the Ubuntu packages; sorry for the delay.

[ku1ik]

@zanchey thanks!

[larryv]

updated in MacPorts, only 3 months late 😓

[ku1ik]

@larryv no prob, thanks!

[ku1ik]

We have a new release! This new 1.3 version is back on Python (read more about it here: http://blog.asciinema.org/post/and-now-for-something-completely-different/). Sorry if this adds you more work (switching build toolchain from Go to Python)! But I believe in the long run the packaging will be simpler, especially that as of this version we have zero external dependencies 💥

[chenrui333]

@sickill looks like the tgz file was not pushed into pypi index.

---

Download failed: https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/a7/71/771c859795e02c71c187546f34f7535487b97425bc1dad1e5f6ad2651357/asciinema-2.1.0.tar.gz

[ku1ik]

Thanks @chenrui333 .

So thanks to @gpotter2 the release setup has been modernized, like this https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema/pull/422/files#diff-76ed074a9305c04054cdebb9e9aad2d818052b07091de1f20cad0bbac34ffb52R22-R24 , but I'm not sure how to make it build/upload tgz. Any tips? I don't often release Python packages and I'm new to twine/wheel...

[ku1ik]

The issue with missing tgz file on pypi is now solved.

[om26er]

Forgot to mention here previously: The asciinema snap is now at version 2.1.0 for a few weeks. http://snapcraft.io/asciinema

I hope we can add that to install instructions as well.

[harkabeeparolus]

Regarding the installation instructions, I propose that the Pip section is amended.

• I would suggest using pipx as the primary way to install Python tools or utilities. It's an official Python Packaging Authority project nowadays, and all the Python podcasts and news sources speak highly of it.

  You can install permanently with pipx install asciinema, or run a one-off with pipx run asciinema play demo.cast.

• I would also suggest not using sudo if you're using pip.

  The recommended incantation is python3 -m pip install asciinema. For ancient versions of pip, you need to specify --user as in python3 -m pip install --user asciinema, but recent pip versions default to the user's home directory when the python site-packages folder is not writable.

Rationale for both points above: See this blog post by Python steering council member and core developer Brett Cannon:
Why you should use python -m pip

I suggest the following:

Installing via Pip

asciinema is available on PyPI and can be installed with pipx or pip (Python 3 required):

pipx install asciinema

Or with pip (using your preferred python version):

python3 -m pip install asciinema

This is the universal installation method for all operating systems, which always provides the latest version.

[ku1ik]

Thanks for the idea and great summary @harkabeeparolus. This sounds good to me. Would you care to open a PR with the proposed change?

[harkabeeparolus]

Thanks for the idea and great summary @harkabeeparolus. This sounds good to me. Would you care to open a PR with the proposed change?

Sure, I can make a PR against your README.md file!

However, I can't find the repo for your official documentation: https://asciinema.org/docs/installation
...So I'm guessing an official team member would have to update that. 😄

[Wittionary]

I'm running into the same error as @aarek-eng , ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'fcntl'.
It seems this module is not available for Windows users (StackOverflow) because it's a unix/linux system call - unless I'm looking at the wrong thing.

I haven't taken a look at the asciinema source to see how large of an effort this would be, but is there the possibility of adding an alternate, Windows-supported file control library?

[rollingmoai]

This works for windows: https://github.com/Watfaq/PowerSession-rs

[ku1ik]

Please discuss Windows issues in separate issues (we do have a couple of them laying around). Thx!

[ku1ik]

I've just pushed 2.2.0 to pypi.org.

[zanchey]

I've updated my PPA. I don't use Ubuntu any more, and pipx looks like a better way to install in general, but the packages should still work. Debian doesn't have a good story for builds without a setup.py, so I added a patch that ships a minimal version.

[ku1ik]

Moved this thread from Issues to GH Discussions.

[ku1ik]

Just released v2.4.0: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema/releases/tag/v2.4.0

[ku1ik]

Hello!

3.0 is coming soon. While it's not 100% done yet (98%-ish), I thought I'll ask already about any potential packaging challenges given the new version is a full Rust rewrite.

The build process is a standard Rust build (cargo build --release), as described here: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema?tab=readme-ov-file#building

Also, the build script can auto-generate man pages and shell completion files when ASCIINEMA_GEN_DIR env var is set, pointing to a directory where those assets should placed. Those then can be put in proper places in the target package.