gini-core

The shared foundation of GINI: the topology model and the tamper-evident proof format. Pure Python, no Qt, no container runtime.

You do not normally install this yourself — gini-toolkit (the gBuilder desktop app) and gini-teaching-center (the course server) both depend on it.

pip install gini-core

Why it is its own package

The Teaching Center runs on a headless VM and must verify student submissions. Verification needs the proof format; it does not need a GUI. Without this split, installing the course server would drag ~400MB of PySide6 onto a server that never draws a pixel — so the server install is 2.3MB instead.

The second reason matters more. gBuilder writes proofs and the Teaching Center verifies them. Those two implementations must agree exactly, forever — a hash chain that disagrees by one field is a student's work rejected. Keeping the format in one distribution both sides depend on means there is no second copy to drift.

What is in it

gini/domain/
  topology.py     Topology, DeviceInstance, Link — the model gBuilder saves and loads
  devices.py      the device/element registry (networking + cloud)
  proof.py        the hash chain, ticket codes, and receipts
  persistence.py  the on-disk .gini project format

gini.domain.proof is the interesting one. A proof is an append-only chain in which every entry commits to the one before it, so a recorded session cannot be edited after the fact without breaking the chain. It is bound to the activity code it was recorded under, and its submit entry carries a SHA-256 of the topology — which is what makes a stolen project file worthless: the file and the code are cryptographically the same claim.

The receipt a student reads off the screen is 40 bits of the chain's MAC, rendered as XXXX-XXXX. gBuilder and the server derive it identically from the proof itself, so a receipt handed to an instructor before the upload lands is still the right receipt after it does.

Namespace package

gini is an implicit namespace package shared with gini-toolkit: this distribution owns gini.domain, the app owns gini.ui, gini.services and the rest. Neither ships a gini/__init__.py — adding one to either would shadow the other and break the import.

License & links

Part of the GINI project — https://github.com/citelab/gini

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