Re: West not installing; Alternative ways to install? #west
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Birch Jr, Johnnie L <johnnie.l.birch.jr@...>
Hi Marc,
Just seeing this, thanks for the follow-up. I think this question of how much material to provide for auxiliary tools and dependencies is a probably a tough one. I think with pip/python, corrupting this installation is pretty easy … multiple versions stashed in different places, multiple tools for installing packages, like you said … everything works like magic until it doesn’t. I am not sure how much more pip material would have been useful for me here but if it included a section on common issues that matched mine then obviously that would have been helpful. In general what is truly invaluable when getting are forums like this where there is a lot of activity and folks are reading and responding helping to build a knowledge base that you can search.
Johnnie
From: Herbert, Marc
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2019 11:11 AM To: Birch Jr, Johnnie L <johnnie.l.birch.jr@...>; Marti Bolivar <marti@...> Cc: users@... Subject: Re: [Zephyr-users] West not installing; Alternative ways to install? #west
Hi,
I think the current Getting Started guide really underestimates the importance of "pip[3]".
The zephyr repo has about 100 Python scripts now and counting and pip plays an incredibly crucial role in "Getting Started", it's like magic... until something breaks. Then it's like: "What was this pip thing again and what did it change on my system? Wait, *all that*?" Happened to me and apparently Johnnie too.
On Linux the interactions between Python packages installed by the Operating System vs the --user ones installed in ~/.local/bin can be especially fun, e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/591421/
Reading the current https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/getting_started/getting_started.html from the start, the very first mention of pip for Windows and MacOS is:
Bootstrap west Install the bootstrapper for Zephyr’s command-line tool, West (Zephyr’s meta-tool) in a shell or cmd.exe prompt: # Linux pip3 install --user west
# macOS and Windows pip3 install west
... and then a forward-reference to installing more dependencies with pip. Not a word about what pip even is; into the deep end. Of course pip can easily be Googled, however one purpose of a Getting Started guide is IMHO to explain the bare minimum about every new critical thing without having to research it.
To avoid the forward reference and give pip a bit more of the credit it deserves, I think most things pip should be in a new, short but very first "PIP" section, in the main page and before anything about west considering west needs pip. This new and "true" PIP section can then have a very short introduction briefly describing what is and emphasizing how important it is and a link to its (good!) home page https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/ in case something goes wrong. Such a "promotion" would hopefully encourage new users to pay a bit more attention to pip and for instance not dismiss any warning from it.
The slimmed down "Python Dependencies" section found later could then be downgraded to a one-line subsection of "Set Up a tool[chain]".
My 2 cents while I still remember about my "getting started" experience - this sort of experience tends to fade away very quickly :-)
Marc
From:
<users@...> on behalf of "Birch Jr, Johnnie L" <johnnie.l.birch.jr@...>
Hi Marti, all,
Thanks for the reply. There was something corrupt related to my pip/python install. Seems multiple versions of pip3 were found where version check at the command line would show version 3.5.2 while printing the version from a python statement would show 19.0.2. Ultimately I used some combination of commands using easy_install3 to get it installed instead of using pip.
Thanks,
From: Marti Bolivar [mailto:marti@...]
Hi Johnnie,
You can run "pip3 show -f west" to see where west was installed. Please make sure that is on your PATH. On Linux that is likely to be ~/.local/bin or so.
Marti On Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 7:23 PM <johnnie.l.birch.jr@... wrote:
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