MacOS support

[GuardKenzie]

I want to get chafa.py to support MacOS since chafa does, however, this is proving to be a bit of a challenge. If anyone is interested in helping out or has any ideas, please reply to this discussion thread. After doing some reading on using ctypes with homebrew and this is the conclusion:

The mess

After apple introduced Apple silicon, homebrew moved the installation location of libraries from /usr/local to /opt/homebrew (See this discussion). The Python ctypes library does not search for .dylib files in this path but homebrew seems to ship a patched version of python which does (See this discussion and this stack overflow post)

I can see two ways of moving forwards:

1. Manually search for libchafa and libglib-2.0 in /opt/homebrew (I'm leaning towards this solution)
2. Having part of the requirements for MacOS be using a brew installed Python
3. Packaging prebuilt binaries with the chafa.py wheel (I cannot do this myself since I lack an apple computer for bulding/testing)

[reagle]

1. Hackish, but might work.
2. If there was a chafa.py brew, I could see it requiring that dependency, but I'm using pip and pyenv, for example.
3. Again, I don't know much about packages and distribution, but I wonder if there's github triggers for building platform-specific binaries...?

[GuardKenzie]

I wonder if there's github triggers for building platform-specific binaries...?

I think GitHub actions might be able to do that. I tried using an automated build action for windows and Linux and it also seems to support MacOS. I'll just need to test that on a fork or something.

I would need to build both glib2 and chafa in order for it to work though. Shouldn't be too much of an issue (foreshadowing haha)

[GuardKenzie]

@reagle You were right! I managed to build chafa.py for MacOS on GitHub actions through the magic of trial and error (and a bit of luch). There are now built wheels for intel MacOS computers available on PyPi.

The reason for only supporting intel macs for the moment can be found in this issue. The GitHub runners don't support M1 macs yet so I have no way of building on one. If anyone is interested in helping out with that, I'd be delighted!

[hpjansson]

Hi @fxcoudert, @chenrui333 -- I noticed you've been maintaining Chafa for Homebrew. Thanks a ton for that! Do you know someone who'd be interested in helping @GuardKenzie, or maybe packaging chafa.py? Neither of us has a Mac at the moment, but it'd be cool to have Python bindings there.