Including custom modules with a Watchman plugin

[smn-automation]

This may be a no-brainer, but I couldn't find in the documentation the preferred method for incorporating external modules in Python with a Watchman plugin written in Python in a way that is easily distributed to users of the plugin.

Please let me know how I should be doing this, thank you!

[YesThatAllen]

Hi Scott,

We do have a /Library/MonitoringClient/Utilities/Modules/ folder we can use, if you want to reference a module there, we can distribute it.

[smn-automation]

cool we'll try that.

How does one submit modules to include in that folder?

Here is the first one I'd like to include
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/semantic_version/2.4.2

[garybourgeois]

How does one submit modules to include in that folder?

I think you just did ;)

I just wanted to note this:

semantic_version supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4

We still technically support OSX 10.5 in the client, which uses Python 2.5, but the plugins can have their own level of support and do an OS version check. Just something to keep in mind for anything using non-default modules.

[smn-automation]

Gary,

In our case we dodged a bullet.

According to this
http://www.archiware.com/requirements-compatibilities.311.1.html

Minimum requirements is OS X 10.6 on Intel :-)

I can't speak globally, but we're ok for this plugin.

I will say that that is a VERY nice library for comparing version strings, so I was glad to find it. Beats writing your own code to extract major/minor/build/etc. out of version strings! You might want to make it a Watchman standard (unless you have something better already), so that all plugin developers are using similar code

[garybourgeois]

I know there's a couple spots where we have to do a version comparison, I can't recall offhand exactly how that happens in each spot, but generally I just do a tuple/list of integers.

Say in this case, something along the lines of:

plugin_needs = [ 10, 6 ]
os_version = [ int(i) for i in platform.mac_ver()[0].split('.') ]

if ( os_version < plugin_needs ):
  sys.exit(25)

import symantic_version

I've considered throwing some type of function into our toolkit to handle stuff like this, but then there's an outlier or two that like to throw letters into the version numbers and ehhh ... have just taken it on a plugin-by-plugin basis so far.

The only problem I have with using semantic_version on something like this is that it has to get imported to be able to use it to check the OS version so we know if we can import it. I have no clue how it would handle more elaborate version strings, though, so I'm definitely not against checking it out.