[Python-modules-team] Mycroft AI packaging efforts: Solicitation for help

[Arron Atchison]

Hello everyone,

I work for a open source voice activated personal assistant project called
Mycroft. You can find out more about it here <https://mycroft.ai/> and the
source for our projects here <https://github.com/MycroftAI>.

Members of my team and also some community members have been working on
Debian packages for quite some time and we need some help. Specifically we
need to package and maintain Python dependencies upstream. Currently, we
are using pip to install these dependencies as they are not always present
or up to date in the apt repositories. As we begin to collaborate with
other projects and distributions more and more, we realize that we have to
get our PPA into shape. Recently, the KDE packaging lead has begun to help
us with this.

This is our official PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~mycroft-ai/+archive/ubuntu/mycroft-ai
Here is his PPA.
https://launchpad.net/~clivejo/+archive/ubuntu/plasma-mycroft/+packages

For a little more backgroud, we currently distribute packages like this:

   1. clone the source
   2. checkout a release version
   3. create a virtualenv (with the relocatable option)
   4. enter the virtualenv and install pip requirements from
   requirements.txt
   5. use setup tools to create bdists
   6. copy the virtualenv and build artifacts into the debian package file
   system
   7. use gdebi to create a package

This has numerous disadvantages and does not create a source package. It
also does not work across different distributions and distribution
versions. To get around this, we have attempted to use dh_virtualenv from
Spotify, which can be found here: https://github.com/spotify/dh-virtualenv
We are also not having any luck with this method.

We knew that the other only way might be to create individual Debian
packages for all of the python requirements at some point, and that's the
route we are starting to take now. Would anyone be able or willing to help
us? I have heard that you folks have some great tools for automation.

Thanks,

Arron Atchison
Mycroft AI Inc.
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