Installation is very hard

[trou]

Hello, first, thank you for your presentation at Recon which was really cool. Also thanks for releasing this tool.

I am mainly opening this issue to document the problems that I have when trying to install pcbre on Debian sid :

• the readme does not clearly state that Python 3 is needed
• apt-get install libcapnp-dev python3-numpy python3-scipy libgeos-dev python3-mock python3-pyside cython3 libpotrace-dev libagg-dev cover most dependancies
• your fork of pypotrace where you changed "agg_pic" to "agg" in setup.py breaks compilation on Debian
• pycapnp doesn't find schema.capnp when installing, PYTHONPATH must be modified by hand
• opencv-2 doesn't have python3 bindings, one must install opencv-3 to have python3 bindings.

Once most libraries are installed : rtree and opengl module are missing, fix with :

apt install libspatialindex-dev
pip install rtree PyOpenGL

THEN pcbre starts :)

Note that python3-opengl from Debian does not work.

[davidcarne]

First of, thanks for giving pcbre a go. It being a huge pain to install is unfortunately a known issue - but one I'm very interested in fixing!

Comments inline:

the readme does not clearly state that Python 3 is needed

Good catch, I'll update this

apt-get install libcapnp-dev python3-numpy python3-scipy libgeos-dev python3-mock python3-pyside cython3 libpotrace-dev libagg-dev cover most dependancies

Thanks, I'll add this to the README, along with the libraries below

your fork of pypotrace where you changed "agg_pic" to "agg" in setup.py breaks compilation on Debian

Hmm, good point. I'd forgotten I had to do this - the main point of the fork was Python3 compatibility. This was due to some kind of Gentoo issue. I'll back it out and look for a better fix.

pycapnp doesn't find schema.capnp when installing, PYTHONPATH must be modified by hand

Now thats a bit odd. Do you mean that schema.capnp doesn't get installed into pcbre.model.serialization? I'll get a debian VM up and check this out

opencv-2 doesn't have python3 bindings, one must install opencv-3 to have python3 bindings.

Yes - I'm using cv3. Does debian have an opencv3 package?

[trou]

For pycapnp I'm not really sure of what's going on. I've been messing with it so it may be my fault.

Debian has no opencv3 package, I compiled it from source.

[deactivated]

Hi,

I also really enjoyed your presentation at Recon! Here are my notes from installing pcbre on OS X:

• Most non-python dependencies installed correctly using homebrew (spatialindex, libagg, capnp, potrace, geos)
• I had to compile OpenCV 3 manually so that it targeted the right versions of Python -- but I suspect that many people will be able to install it with homebrew.
• Python dependencies installed correctly using pip (rtree, pycapnp, pyopengl)
• I switched pypotrace to use setuptools, but it otherwise installed cleanly.
• If the rtree version is out of sync with spatialindex, you will get some moderately obscure runtime errors.

I ran into a few issues with OpenGL support. Some of these might merit a separate issue:

• Setting the OpenGL core profile doesn't seem to work in Pyside on OS X by default. I was able to hack around this by using a patched version of PyQt4.
• The glimports.py module tries to load libGL.so, which doesn't exist on OS X. Those imports don't seem to be used anymore, so I just commented them out.
• OS X didn't support the GLSL 1.2 shaders. Updating them to use newer syntax worked.
• OS X supports OpenGL 4.1—however, the trace view uses glDrawElementsInstancedBaseInstance which is introduced in version 4.2. I was able to get things mostly running by switching the calls to use the non-BaseInstance version.

[balr0g]

@deactivated: how did you patch PyQt4? I was able to make it work with PySide by patching Qt4 itself, but that's quite annoying.

[deactivated]

@balr0g I manually applied this patch from prideout/coregl-python/pyqt-hacks to a recent version of PyQt4.

It's also possible to build PyQt4 directly against Qt 5—I tried that, and it solves the OpenGL profile issue, however the UI was a bit buggy, and I couldn't tell which issues were related to Qt 5 and which were in pcbre.