pytktable-binaries

Prebuilt Tktable, the Tcl/Tk table widget, for pytktable, so that Python users don't need to install Tktable with their operating system's package manager.

Each wheel contains Tktable compiled for Tcl/Tk 8.6 and for Tcl/Tk 9.0; Tcl loads the one matching the Tcl/Tk of the Python that runs it. The libraries don't depend on the Python version, so one wheel per platform works with every Python 3.

Possible future platforms

• Linux on other CPUs: 32-bit ARM (armv7l, older Raspberry Pi OS), ppc64le, s390x, riscv64. They would be compiled under emulation, which is slow.
• Linux with glibc older than 2.28 (manylinux2014): only end-of-life distributions, e.g. CentOS 7.
• macOS older than 11.
• PyPy: the wheels don't depend on the Python version, so they should already work; it would need a test job.

Usage

library_dir() returns the folder to add to Tcl's auto_path. For example, with pytktable:

import os

import tktable_binaries

os.environ["TKTABLE_LIBRARY"] = str(tktable_binaries.library_dir())

How it is built

• tktable-src is a Git submodule pinned to a Tktable release tag.
• versions.env pins the Tcl/Tk sources it is compiled against (only their headers and stub libraries are used, so the result works with any Tcl/Tk 8.6.x or 9.0.x).
• scripts/build-unix.sh (Linux, macOS) and scripts/build-windows.ps1 (Windows) compile Tktable against Tcl/Tk 8.6 and 9.0, and scripts/collect.py puts both in one Tktable<version> folder.
• scripts/make_wheel.py builds the wheel of one platform from that folder.
• The Build workflow (.github/workflows/build.yml) does all of this on GitHub Actions: it calls compile-linux.yml, compile-macos.yml and compile-windows.yml, builds the wheels, then calls test.yml, which tests them with pytktable's tests on each platform, and on Fedora and Alpine (scripts/test-distro.sh).

To update Tktable, check out another tag in the submodule, and set version in pyproject.toml to its version:

git -C tktable-src fetch --tags

git -C tktable-src checkout <tag>

Versioning

The version is the version of Tktable it contains, plus a fourth number for the releases of this package with the same Tktable (e.g. a build fix or a new platform):

PEP 440 allows any number of version components, so 2.12.2 < 2.12.2.1 < 2.12.3.

Development

Install Poetry, then the dev dependencies and the pre-commit hooks, which format and lint Python, YAML, shell and PowerShell files, and scan for secrets, on every git commit:

poetry install

poetry run pre-commit install

The PowerShell hook needs PowerShell 7 (pwsh) and PSScriptAnalyzer. Save PSScriptAnalyzer once inside the repository, in .tools/Modules (not in Git), so nothing changes outside the repository:

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force .tools/Modules

Save-PSResource PSScriptAnalyzer -Path .tools/Modules -TrustRepository

To run all hooks on all files, as the Checks workflow does:

poetry run pre-commit run --all-files

Releasing

1. Set version in pyproject.toml (see Versioning) and commit it to main.
2. Push a tag with the same version, e.g. 2.12.2.

The Release workflow (.github/workflows/release.yml) then checks that the tag and the version are equal, builds and tests the wheels, publishes them to PyPI with Trusted Publishing (no API token), and creates a GitHub release with them.

AI assistance

This repository was created with the help of Claude (Anthropic). The maintainer reviewed the changes, but not always thoroughly. Please report any problem you find.

License

The build scripts: BSD 2-Clause. Tktable: its own license, included in the wheels.