Distribution on PyPI?

[paulromano]

One way of significantly simplifying installation on a user's machine is to have OpenMC distributed on PyPI as a proper Python package (with wheels). Then, installing OpenMC would be as simple as:

pip install openmc

I think we're actually not that far from being able to do this. For starters, we'd probably want to build manylinux wheels so that Linux users can install OpenMC binaries and then work on other platforms from there.

When I was looking into this, I ran into this github org which looks to be responsible for building wheels for many packages in the Python scientific ecosystem.

[paulromano]

https://github.com/matthew-brett/multibuild has a lot of the infrastructure needed. Namely, there is a build_hdf5 function in library_builders.sh there, so we don't need to figure out how to build HDF5 correctly on the manylinux Docker image.

[sindrehk]

One way of significantly simplifying installation on a user's machine is to have OpenMC distributed on PyPI as a proper Python package (with wheels)...

This would be very helpful for installing into the jupyter/docker-stacks as well!

[shimwell]

Making wheels with scikit-build appears possible (see branch and comment here), perhaps this could be combined with cibuildwheel to build wheels for a variety of different OS and C++ dependencies

Thanks to @pshriwise for pointing out cibuildwheel

[shimwell]

I have done a little more work on this

The latest pip install can be tested with

pip install git+https://github.com/shimwell/openmc@pip_install_try_while_at_nea

I can't be sure (as I don't have one) but I don't think it works on MacOs