ctypes
wrapping of Tox
libtoxcore into Python.
Taken from the wrapper directory of the now abandoned
https://github.com/toxygen-project/toxygen next_gen branch
by Ingvar.
The basics of NGC groups are supported, as well as AV and toxencryptsave.
There is no coverage of conferences as they are not used in toxygen
and the list of still unwrapped calls as of Sept. 2022 can be found in
tox.c-toxcore.missing. The code still needs double-checking
that every call in tox.py has the right signature, but it runs
toxygen with no apparent issues.
It has been tested with UDP and TCP proxy (Tor). It has not been
tested on Windows, and there may be some minor breakage, which should be
easy to fix. There is a good coverage integration testsuite in wrapper_tests.
Change to that directory and run tests_wrapper.py --help; the test
suite gives a good set of examples of usage.
Put the parent of the wrapper directory on your PYTHONPATH and
touch a file called __init__.py in its parent directory.
Then you need a libs directory beside the wrapper directory
and you need to link your libtoxcore.so and libtoxav.so
and libtoxencryptsave.so into it. Link all 3 filenames
to libtoxcore.so if you have only libtoxcore.so
(which is usually the case if you built c-toxcore with cmake
rather than autogen/configure). If you want to be different,
the environment variable TOXCORE_LIBS overrides the location of libs.
As is, the code in tox.py is very verbose. Edit the file to change
def LOG_ERROR(a): print('EROR> '+a)
def LOG_WARN(a): print('WARN> '+a)
def LOG_INFO(a): print('INFO> '+a)
def LOG_DEBUG(a): print('DBUG> '+a)
def LOG_TRACE(a): pass # print('TRAC> '+a)
to all pass # or use logging.logger to suite your tastes.
logging.logger can be dangerous in callbacks in Qt applications,
so we use simple print statements as default. The same applies to
wrapper/tests_wrapper.py.
No prerequisites in Python3.
There are a number of other wrappings into Python of Tox core.
This one uses ctypes
which has its merits - there is no need to recompile anything as with
Cython - change the Python file and it's done. And you can follow things
in a Python debugger, or with the utterly stupendous Python feature of
gdb (gdb -ex r --args /usr/bin/python3.9 <pyfile>).
CTYPES code can be brittle, segfaulting if you've got things wrong, but if your wrapping is right, it is very efficient and easy to work on. The faulthandler module can be helpful in debugging crashes (e.g. from segmentation faults produced by erroneous C library wrapping).
Others include:
-
https://github.com/TokTok/py-toxcore-c Cython bindings. Incomplete and not really actively supported. Maybe it will get worked on in the future, but TokTok seems to be working on java, rust, scalla, go, etc. bindings instead. No support for NGC groups or toxencryptsave.
-
https://github.com/oxij/PyTox forked from https://github.com/aitjcize/PyTox by Wei-Ning Huang aitjcize@gmail.com. Hardcore C wrapping which is not easy to keep up to date. No support for NGC or toxencryptsave. Abandonned. This was the basis for the TokTok/py-toxcore-c code until recently.
To our point of view, the ability of CTYPEs to follow code in the debugger is a crucial advantage.
Work on this project is suspended until the MultiDevice problem is solved. Fork me!