kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Steven A. Falco" <stevenfalco@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'd like to have a discussion about python shebangs.  I noticed several rpmlint errors when building the official Fedora packages.  Specifically, rpmlint is complaining about using "env" as a method for locating the python interpreter.  Here are the errors:

kicad-doc.noarch: E: wrong-script-interpreter /usr/share/doc/kicad/scripts/ddr3_length_match.py /usr/bin/env python2
kicad-doc.noarch: E: wrong-script-interpreter /usr/share/doc/kicad/scripts/mk_macos_icons.py /usr/bin/env python
kicad-doc.noarch: E: wrong-script-interpreter /usr/share/doc/kicad/scripts/mk_mime_icons.py /usr/bin/env python

I've done a little research, and apparently, the concern is that "env" may find a locally installed python interpreter that doesn't work the same as the system python interpreter, and that can result in subtle bugs.  Of course the locally-installed interpreter may have been installed specifically because of bugs in the system interpreter!

There is an interesting web page https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2018/02/16/on-python-shebangs/ that goes into a lot more detail about this topic.

I see a few ways I can proceed.

1) Ignore the errors.  I don't know if this is viable - I have to wait a week or so to see if the package is accepted with the errors present.

2) Add a Fedora-only patch to change the shebangs into something acceptable.  I'd probably set them to "#!/usr/bin/python2".

3) Add an "exception file" to tell rpmlint to ignore these errors.

4) Have upstream KiCad "fix" the problem, although given the discussion in the web page above, I'm not even sure what a good fix would be.

Some people have suggested having the build scripts locate the correct (system) interpreter to use, and patch the scripts at build-time to explicitly put in the absolute path to the system interpreter.  That might be a nice way to deal with cross-platform issues between Mac, Linux, and Windows but it could get messy if a later OS release puts the interpreter in a different place or renames it.

Please let me know what you think about this so I know how to proceed.

	Thanks,
	Steve