Publish iOS and Android wheels to PyPi

[marcpabst]

Now that PyPi supports iOS and Android wheels (pypi/warehouse#17559), is there a chance you could start publishing those too? As far as I can tell, pymunk should compile for those platforms too. You might also look at cibuildwheel.

[viblo]

I think it would be great to have, but Im hesitant to do anything outside of cibuildwheel. On the other hand I see it is hopefully coming to cibuildwheel: pypa/cibuildwheel#1960 and once its in I think it will be easy to add. Note however that Pymunk requires CFFI, meaning CFFI must also have wheels for the target for it to be really useful.

As a sidenote, at least for Android its possible to build/install from the source wheel, so you should already now be able to run it there. On iOS Im unsure of the support. In theory it should be possible, both Pymunk itself and the underlying Chipmunk library should support it, but I have never tested it.

Im a bit curious, do you have some specific use case in mind for pymunk on iOS/Android?

[marcpabst]

That’s exactly what I meant - glad to see you agree! The Beeware maintainer is really pushing for this, so I think cibuildwheel will support it very soon.

I do have a bit of a niche use case. I’m running (or planning to run) child-friendly (mostly vision-related) psychophysics experiments on tablets. I’m currently building a Python-based framework to run them, and we tend to gamify our experiemnts as much as possible to make them fun and engaging. So some simple physics elements that work on iOS would be really nice to have! I have been using a custom Python wrapper for Rapier (which is a great library), but I can’t really justify maintaining that myself.

[viblo]

Sounds interesting!

Im not sure if you have considered it (and it might be other things that make this inconvenient or difficult), but already now I publish wasm wheels for pyodide, so Pymunk can run in the browser. This way it works on both Android and iOS today.

Also, I know that Pymunk runs on python-for-android (in case you do a Kivy android application). I havent kept the recipe up to date, but most likely it would be very easy to update. For Kivy on iOS its a different things, in theory it should work if CFFI works, but I have no idea..

Regardless I will keep an eye on cibuildwheel support.

[marcpabst]

Hey, just fyi, the upcoming 3.0 release of cibuildwheel will have iOS support and it's already available on main!

[viblo]

Nice! I will see if its released quickly enough to be in next Pymunk release, but if not I can always build later.

[marcpabst]

I'm happy to say that I've got it working - it's not 100% straigtforward because cibuildwheel wants to install the iOS version of cffi during build time, which obviously doesn't work.. I'm happy to share my CI files once they're cleaned up a little.

[viblo]

nice!

[viblo]

Pymukn 7.0.1 now includes iOS wheels.

[viblo]

And Pymunk 7.1 includes 3 types of iOS wheels, built with the newly released cibuildwheel 3. I cant test these myself, but hopefully they are working.

[marcpabst]

Very cool! Thank you! Will give this a try and report back!

[mhsmith]

cibuildwheel 3.1.0 has now been released with Android support. However, there are no Android cffi wheels on PyPI yet, and the unofficial ones here will probably not work outside of Chaquopy because of the way they link to libffi. So further progress on this may need to wait for the cffi project to release Android wheels.