License
A valid Kodo license is required if you wish to use this project.
Please request a license by filling out the license request form.
Kodo is available under a research- and education-friendly license, you can see the details here.
If you try to configure without a valid license, then you will get an error!
About
kodo-python contains a set of high-level Python bindings for the Kodo Network Coding C++ library. The bindings provide access to basic functionality provided by Kodo, such as encoding and decoding data. The examples folder contains sample applications showing the usage of the Python API.
If you have any questions or suggestions about this library, please contact us at our developer mailing list (hosted at Google Groups):
Requirements
First of all, follow this Getting Started guide to install the basic tools required for the compilation (C++11 compiler, Git, Python).
The compilers used by Steinwurf are listed at the bottom of the buildbot page.
Linux
These steps may not work with your specific Linux distribution, but they may guide you in the right direction.
First, acquire the required packages from your package management system:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install python build-essential libpython-dev python-dev
If you are using Python 3, you'll need to install libpython3-dev instead.
Mac OSX
Install the latest XCode and Command Line Tools from the Mac Store.
Python 2.7 is pre-installed on OSX, and the required Python headers should also be available. If you are having trouble with the pre-installed Python version, then you can install a more recent Python version with MacPorts or Homebrew.
If you are running Homebrew on OSX 10.14 Mojave, then you should be aware that Homebrew's Python 2.7.15 has some broken include paths, so we cannot compile C++ Python modules with that version. To work around this issue, you can downgrade to Python 2.7.14 using the following commands:
cd /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core/Formula git log --follow python@2.rb git checkout -b python2-2.7.14_3 aa6726ba11 brew reinstall ./python@2.rb brew pin python@2 git checkout master
The brew pin command ensures that Python 2 will not be upgraded if
you run brew upgrade in the future.
Windows
Install Python 2.7 (32-bit) and Visual Studio Express 2015 for Windows Desktop.
Then set the VS90COMNTOOLS environment variable to:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\Tools\
so that Python distutils can detect your new compiler masquerading as Visual Studio 2008 (which is the original compiler for Python 2.7).
distutils must be able to find a valid location for vcvarsall.bat and
it will call that batch file to obtain some compile flags. If you can execute
the following test script without getting an exception, then you should be able
to configure kodo-python using waf:
if __name__ == "__main__":
from distutils import log
log.set_threshold(log.DEBUG)
from distutils.msvccompiler import MSVCCompiler
dist_compiler = MSVCCompiler()
dist_compiler.initialize()
print("Compile options:")
print(dist_compiler.compile_options)
print("LDFLAGS:")
print(dist_compiler.ldflags_shared)
If you only have Visual Studio 2017, then setting VS90COMNTOOLS is
not sufficient, because the location of vcvarsall.bat has changed with
respect to the Common Tools folder. In this case, you can apply this
one-liner patch to msvc9compiler.py in your Python27\Lib\distutils
folder: https://bugs.python.org/file45916/vsforpython.diff
After this, you can set VS90COMNTOOLS to the folder that actually contains
vcvarsall.bat (this depends on the version of VS2017 that you installed):
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\WDExpress\VC\Auxiliary\Build C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\VC\Auxiliary\Build C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build
Building From Source
You need to build the Python bindings from source.
First, clone the project:
git clone git@github.com:steinwurf/kodo-python.git
Configure and build the project:
cd kodo-python python waf configure python waf build
After building the project, you should find the resulting kodo.so,
kodo.dylib or kodo.pyd file here (the actual path and extension
depend on your OS):
build/linux/kodo.so build/darwin/kodo.dylib build/win32/kodo.pyd
You can copy this file to the same folder as your Python scripts, or you can copy it to your PYTHONPATH (so that you can import it from anywhere).
Then you can import the module in your Python script:
>>> import kodo
Special Options
With the enable_codecs option, you can configure kodo-python to only enable
some desired codecs and disable all others. For example:
python waf configure --enable_codecs=rlnc
Run python waf --help to list the available codecs. You can even
select multiple codecs with a comma-separated list:
python waf configure --enable_codecs=rlnc,fulcrum
Compilation Issues on Linux
The compilation process might take a long time on certain Linux systems if less than 4 GB RAM is available. The g++ optimizer might consume a lot of RAM during the compilation, so if you see that all your RAM is used up, then you can try to constrain the number of parallel jobs to only one during the build step:
python waf build -j 1
With this change, a fast compilation is possible with only 2 GB RAM.
This issue is specific to g++ (which is the default compiler on Linux), and the RAM usage and the compilation time can be much better with clang. The code produced by clang is also fast.
If the compilation does not work with g++, then you can install clang like this (on Ubuntu and Debian):
sudo apt-get install clang
Then you can configure the project to use clang++:
CXX=clang++ python waf configure
Compiling on the Raspberry Pi
The detailed instructions for compiling the project on the Raspberry Pi are found in our Raspberry guide.