Installing shared library with python package not separately

Question

I have successfully built a Python package that uses CMake combined with pybind11 to create a shared object (.so - assuming only Linux usage at the moment) file. The implementation works but I am unable to remove this shared object file using pip uninstall .

My setup command in setup.py file looks like this taken from the pybind/cmake_example repository:

setup(
    name='package',
    version='0.0.1',
    author='-',
    author_email='-',
    description='A test project using pybind11 and CMake',
    long_description='',
    ext_modules=[CMakeExtension('packagebindings')],
    cmdclass=dict(build_ext=CMakeBuild),
    zip_safe=False,
    packages=setuptools.find_packages()
)

My CMakeLists.txt file has an install instruction that looks like this:

install(TARGETS packagebindings COMPONENT python LIBRARY DESTINATION ${Python_SITELIB})

To summarise, here are the files that are created when running pip install .:

• path/to/site-packages/package/* - removed by pip uninstall package
• path/to/site-packages/package-0.0.1.dist-info/* - removed by pip uninstall package
• path/to/site-packages/packagebindings.cpython-37m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so - still present after pip uninstall package

I would like to know how make it so that running pip uninstall . removes the .so file.

If a further MRE is required, I can link to a repository.

Answer 1

Your CMake install target seems to place the .so directly into the python installation directory (DESTINATION ${Python_SITE_LIB}). I'm guessing this stops the .so from being registered by Python proper, so it is not removed when uninstalling. I would suggest to make CMake place the .so in a distribution directory, and then add the following option to setup():

data_files = [("installation_bin", ["distribution_bin/library.so"])]

This will let the .so be tracked by the Python package manager. The first string is a directory relative to the installation prefix. The second string is the .so file in your distribution, relative to the setup.py script.