pythonwaf

How to install waf?

I have cloned and built the waf script using: 

./waf-light configure

Then to build my project (provided by Gomspace) I need to add waf and the eclipse.py to my path. So far I haven't found better than this setenv script: 

WAFROOT=~/git/waf/
export PYTHONPATH=$WAFROOT/waflib/extras/:$PYTHONPATH
export PATH=~/git/waf/:$PATH

Called with: 

source setenv

This is somehow a pretty ugly solution. Is there a more elegant way to install waf?

Solution

  • Fedora (at least Fedora 22) has a yum package for waf, so you could see that it's possible to do a system install of waf, albeit with a hack.

    After you run something like python3 ./waf-light configure build, you'll get a file called waf that's actually a Python script with some binary data at the end. If you put it into /usr/bin and run it as non-root, you'll get an error because it fails to create a directory in /usr/bin. If you run it as root, you'll get the new directory and /usr/bin/waf runs normally.

    Here's the trick that I learned from examining the find_lib() function in the waf Python script.

    1. Copy the waf to /usr/bin/waf
    2. As root, run /usr/bin/waf. Notice that it creates a directory. You'll see something like /usr/bin/.waf-2.0.19-b2f63c807a4215294bf6005410c74c18
    3. mv that directory to /usr/lib, dropping the . in the directory name, e.g. mv /usr/bin/.waf-2.0.19-b2f63c807a4215294bf6005410c74c18 /usr/lib/waf-2.0.19-b2f63c807a4215294bf6005410c74c18
    4. If you want to use waf with Python3, repeat Steps 2-3 running the Python script /usr/bin/waf under Python3. Under Python3, the directory names will start with .waf3-/waf3- instead instead of .waf-/waf-.
    5. (Optional) Remove the binary data at the end of /usr/bin/waf.
    6. Now, non-root should be able to just use /usr/bin/waf.

    That said, here's something to consider, like what another answer said: I believe waf's author intended waf to be embedded in projects so that each project can use its own version of waf without fear that a project will fail to build when there are newer versions of waf. Thus, the one-global-version use case seems to be not officially supported.