[Ubuntu] MapServer Python MapScript and Wheels/Ubuntu Packages

[Seth G]

Hi list,

I've been working recently on updating the Python MapScript bindings for MapServer 7.2 (main pull request at https://github.com/mapserver/mapserver/pull/5645 )

The MapServer build process now produces wheels for both Python2 and 3. The wheels contain package details, tests, and in the near future examples rather than simply creating a .py and .so file

For Windows wheels have been uploaded to PyPI - https://pypi.org/project/mapscript/

For Linux I tried to build wheels using the manylinux project - https://github.com/pypa/manylinux
However to get MapServer and MapScript compiled on a CentOS 5 machine has many complications, so maybe an Ubuntu/Debian package would make more sense for distributing MapScript on Linux?

I see there is already a 7.2 python-mapscript package available at https://packages.ubuntu.com/en/cosmic/python-mapscript
Can Python packages released on Ubuntu make use of wheels to create the package? Would a python3-mapscript package also be possible to create?

Thanks for any information on the above,
Regards,

Seth


--
web:http://geographika.co.uk
twitter: @geographika