Question

I’m trying to install PySide v0.3.1 in Mac OS X, for Qt development in python.

As a pre-requisite, I have installed CMake and the Qt SDK.

I have gone through the documentation and come up with the following installation script:

export PYSIDE_BASE_DIR="<my_dir>"

export APIEXTRACTOR_DIR="$PYSIDE_BASE_DIR/apiextractor-0.5.1"
export GENERATORRUNNER_DIR="$PYSIDE_BASE_DIR/generatorrunner-0.4.2"
export SHIBOKEN_DIR="$PYSIDE_BASE_DIR/shiboken-0.3.1"
export PYSIDE_DIR="$PYSIDE_BASE_DIR/pyside-qt4.6+0.3.1"
export PYSIDE_TOOLS_DIR="$PYSIDE_BASE_DIR/pyside-tools-0.1.3"

pushd .

cd $APIEXTRACTOR_DIR
cmake . 

cd $GENERATORRUNNER_DIR
cmake -DApiExtractor_DIR=$APIEXTRACTOR_DIR .

cd $SHIBOKEN_DIR
cmake -DApiExtractor_DIR=$APIEXTRACTOR_DIR -DGeneratorRunner_DIR=$GENERATORRUNNER_DIR .

cd $PYSIDE_DIR
cmake -DShiboken_DIR=$SHIBOKEN_DIR/libshiboken -DGENERATOR=$GENERATORRUNNER_DIR .

cd $PYSIDE_TOOLS_DIR
cmake .

popd

Now, I don’t know if this installation script is ok, but apparently everything works fine. Each component (apiextractor, generatorrunner, shiboken, pyside-qt and pyside-tools) gets compiled into its own directory.

The problem is that I don’t quite understand how PySide gets into the system’s python environment. In fact, when I start a python shell, I cannot import PySide:

>>> import PySide
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named PySide

Note: I am aware of the Installing PySide – OSX question, but that question is not relevant anymore, because it is about a specific a dependency on the Boost libraries, but with version 0.3.0 PySide moved from a Boost based source code to a CPython one.

Answer 1

I don’t have any MacOS experience but assuming it’s similar to any *nix, let’s go:

About the script: Isn’t it missing some “make, make install” commands? The version you posted just run cmake to configure the build. Also for testing, I set -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX= for all modules. That way everything is installed in the same place and CMake takes care of finding them for me, as long as I used the same install prefix for each one. The directory layout in your script is quite complicated and mixes build and source directories.

About finding PySide: once everything is properly compiled and installed, the directory where the “PySide” directory was installed must be available in the PYTHONPATH variable. In the example below,

Here’s a simple version of a build script(works on Ubuntu):

#!/bin/bash

BUILD_ROOT=/tmp/pyside-build
INSTALL_PREFIX=/tmp/sandbox

function build_module {
    cd $BUILD_ROOT
    echo Cloning project $1 from url $2
    git clone --depth 1 $2 $BUILD_ROOT/$1

    BUILD_DIR=$BUILD_ROOT/$1/build
    mkdir -p $BUILD_DIR
    cd $BUILD_DIR

    echo Configuring $1 build.
    cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$INSTALL_PREFIX ..

    echo Configured $1. Starting build.
    make LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$INSTALL_PREFIX/lib

    echo Built $1. Installing.
    make install
    echo Successfully built and installed $1
}

rm -rf $BUILD_ROOT
mkdir -p $BUILD_ROOT
build_module apiextractor git://gitorious.org/pyside/apiextractor.git
build_module generatorrunner git://gitorious.org/pyside/generatorrunner.git
build_module shiboken git://gitorious.org/pyside/shiboken.git
build_module pyside-shiboken git://gitorious.org/pyside/pyside-shiboken.git

Run it and wait a while (Qt is quite big). 🙂

This script will download all packages into /tmp/pyside-build, build each one in its own “build” directory and install everything into /tmp/sandbox. Then, I just had to set PYTHONPATH to /tmp/sandbox/lib/python2.6/site-packages and PySide worked fine.