automate carta-remote packaging & installation?

[o-smirnov]

So @gijzelaerr did make a KERN package for CARTA a while back, but there's a couple of problems (at least as far as radiopadre is concerned):

• CARTA is updating very rapidly at present and adding desirable features, KERN is not keeping up.

• I want to deploy radiopadre (& thus CARTA) in bare-bones cluster environments, where KERN (or even a sysadmin) may not be available. So I want it installable in a virtualenv basically.

Because CARTA is install-free (just unpack the tarball and go), I've worked around it in the install script. This just pulls down a tarball from https://github.com/CARTAvis/carta/releases and unpacks it in the venv directory.

From the user's point of view, this can lead to mysteriously long setup times, as the tarball is busy downloading, etc.

Question for you guys is, is there a better way to do this? Can we deploy it via a PyPI wrapper? (So at least setup tells the user it's downloading CARTA...) Or would that be a grave abuse of PyPI, since there isn't a single line of Python in the beast?

[o-smirnov]

P.S. Not urgent, juts something to keep on the back burner.

[gijzelaerr]

well now i think of it, why not make it a python script (carta-downloader) that you can pip install, installs a thing in your bin directory that will download this?

[o-smirnov]

Well that's effectively what the radiopadre setup script is doing already.

But I want caaaaaaching... and a pony... and a red Porsche!

[adrianjhpc]

Maybe you could just hire someone to travel round installing radiopadre for anyone who wants it...? You could call it "platinum level package install". Hell, people would probably pay for the bespoke service ;)

[o-smirnov]

Ah, you mean become a consultant!

[o-smirnov]

I mean it's clearly an easier career path to the red Porsche...