PyPy is back, and for real this time!

As you may recall, I was looking for a dedicated PyPy maintainer for quite some time. Sadly, all the people who helped (and who I’d like to thank a lot) ended up lacking time soon enough. So finally I’ve decided to look into the hacks reducing build-time memory use and take care of the necessary ebuild and packaging work myself.

So first of all, you may notice that the new PyPy (source-code) ebuilds have a new USE flag called low-memory. When this flag is enabled, the translation process is done using PyPy with some memory-reducing adjustments suggested by upstream. The net result is that it finally is possible to build PyPy with 3.5G RAM (on amd64) and 1G of swap (the latter being used the compiler is spawned and memory used during translation is no longer necessary), at a cost of slightly increased build time.

As noted above, the low-memory option requires using PyPy to perform the translation. So while having to enforce that, I went a bit further and made the ebuild default to using PyPy whenever available. In fact, even for a first PyPy build you are recommended to install dev-python/pypy-bin first and let the ebuild use it to bootstrap your own PyPy.

Next, I have cleaned up the ebuilds a bit and enforced more consistency. Changing maintainers and binary package builders have resulted in the ebuilds being a bit inconsistent. Now you can finally expect pypy-bin to install exactly the same set of files as source-built pypy.

I have also cleaned up the remaining libpypy-c symlinks. The library is not packaged upstream currently, and therefore has no proper public name. Using libpypy-c.so is just wrong, and packages can’t reliably refer to that. I’d rather wait with installing it till there’s some precedence in renaming. The shared library is still built but it’s kept inside the PyPy home directory.

All those changes were followed by a proper version bump to 2.4.0. While you still may have issues upgrading PyPy, Zac already committed a patch to Portage and the next release should be able to handle PyPy upgrades seamlessly. I have also built all the supported binary package variants, so you can choose those if you don’t want to spend time building PyPy.

Finally, I have added the ebuilds for PyPy 3. They are a little bit more complex than regular PyPy, especially because the build process and some of the internal modules still require Python 2. Sadly, PyPy 3 is based on Python 3.2 with small backports, so I don’t expect package compatibility much greater than CPython 3.2 had.

If you want to try building some packages with PyPy 3, you can use the convenience PYTHON_COMPAT_OVERRIDE hack:

PYTHON_COMPAT_OVERRIDE='pypy3' emerge -1v mypackage

Please note that it is only a hack, and as such it doesn’t set proper USE flags (PYTHON_TARGETS are simply ignored) or enforce dependencies.

If someone wants to help PyPy on Gentoo a bit, there are still unsolved issues needing a lot of specialist work. More specifically:

  1. #465546; PyPy needs to be modified to support /usr prefix properly (right now, it requires prefix being /usr/lib*/pypy which breaks distutils packages assuming otherwise.
  2. #525940; non-SSE2 JIT does not build.
  3. #429372; we lack proper sandbox install support.

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