Consider standarising the build system with distutils

[Groctel]

First of all, thank you very much for your work! ❤️ This issue is motivated by my desire to maintain your program in the AUR and make it available to many more people.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Right now, the program can only be built using the scripts provided in Scripts/ and required de submodules stored in Dependencies/. As I commented in #1013, DearPyGui cannot be built from the releases because the source code distributed there is not a git repo and doesn't contain the data required to initialise the submodules.

So, right now there are two options to build this program:

• Clone the repo and build form source.
• Use pip to install the whl files for the latest version.

However, there are two major problems with both systems.

Cloning the repo and the submodules is slow and the installation scripts are package-manager-agnostic, which means that extreme measures are taken to ensure the user has all dependencies installed like building the Python package. These scripts also require to be used with root permissions, which is something they should only need for install instructions, not build ones.

On the other hand, the whl files' URLs are hashed, which means that the maintainer should manually check the download link every time they want to update the program, which defeats the purpose of many update automation tools and makes maintaining the package harder.

Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally, DearPyGui should switch their build system to distutils so that the repository root includes a setup.py file with all the required dependencies and installation instructions.

Additional context

As I said at the beginning of this issue, I'm trying to maintain your project in the AUR. Right now, I'm co-maintaining manim, which has a pyproject.toml file that they process to a setup.py file for their releases. One of its dependencies, ManimPango, has a setup.py file in their repo. This package requires cython to be built, but users can get it from their package manager without having to recompile everything every time they update. In the case of missing dependencies, there's no need to worry, since distutils will check for the packages in pip or users can add it to the repos.

What do you think about this change?
Thanks for reading :)

[hoffstadt]

Hey, so starting out let me say that I am not an expert in python or distutils.

I am 100% on-board with making it easier for you to maintain the AUR version however I'm not sure we can just switch the build system out right (which would be a huge undertaking regardless). Some of the issues are:

1. From my understanding, distutils and other python support build tools are more for pure python modules or simple (build wise) c-extensions. Our build instructions change per operating system, python version, and embedded vs. deployed version. Which are not trivial.
2. The alternative to using submodules, would be us keeping copies of the code (which is huge for the case of cpython) or building binaries and storing those. Both of these options increases the size of the repo excessively. It also makes it difficult to accurately gauge several informative metrics of the repo (commit history, lines added/removed, contributors, etc.). Not to mention, building dependencies from source makes it easier to developer on new platforms.
3. distutils (and other python build tools) do not support objective-C++.
4. We use locally embedded versions of python for testing and development (distutils does not support this).
5. The build system is just going to get more and more complicated as we approach mobile and web support which distutils definitely doesn't easily support.

So what can we do?

We could try to solve whatever issues you are having now with the current build system or prebuild wheels. And if we can't, we can try to add a separate build procedure to help you out.

[hoffstadt]

Turns out I've made a few wrong assumptions here. We will add a setup.py file in the near future (few weeks).

[Groctel]

Hi! Sorry for the radio silence. I'm working on maintaining the repos in my free time and I've lost the little I had this week. I'll try to reach you this weekend to work side by side with you to build the setup system. Thank you for taking the project into consideration and thank you very much for you time and effort ❤️

[pbk0]

What is your take on cibuildwheel. Also, this video talks about experience using it. Nice thing is, cibuildwheel also has "Windows ARM64" covered.