Mitsuba on musl / Alpine

[isolin]

Hi! Would it please be possible to provide a python wheel for musl distros like Alpine Linux? That would be awesome since the corresponding docker containers would shrink quite a lot :) Currently pip tells there is no matching distribution of Mitsuba.

Here is a simple Dockerfile to demonstrate

FROM python:3.10-alpine
RUN pip install mitsuba

or just run

docker pull python:3.10-alpine
docker run -it python:3.10-alpine sh
# and inside the container
pip install mitsuba

[njroussel]

Hi @isolin !

My current understanding is that the NVidia drivers are linked against glibc, so if we were to provide a musl build of mitsuba it would be without any cuda_* variants ☹️ .
Also, if I recall correctly, there are a few places in our codebase where we make use of GNU extensions that are not in musl. Some code definitely would need to change. I haven't checked our external dependencies, but those might also rely on some specific glibc extensions.
So, it's not just a matter of building the wheel - we would need to rewrite some parts of the code.

I don't think this is a priority for us. But, if someone were to look into this and could make an assessment of how much code would need to change, I'd be happy to help.

[isolin]

Hi njroussel! I see, sounds like a lot of pain. In fact I would be fine with the scalar, but I guess a few Mb of the image are not worth the time if also other dependencies are specific to glibc. For now I took FROM python:3.10-slim-bullseye which makes 106Mb with Mitsuba. That is not bad at all :)