Arch Linux User Repository

Hey potatoe, it took me more than 2 years but thanks for the advice and the detailed explanation, I finally made time to move that pesky Raspberry Pi dependency to optional and included the other ones you mentioned too!

Sorry, I meant this package, python-adafruit-gpio-git, contains support for using an FT232H (if you have the libftdi package installed) as a USB-connected GPIO expander (see the example at https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-ft232h-breakout/gpio ). This should work on any machine with a USB port, even on desktop computers (in fact, the project's README describes how to install it on Linux, Mac, and Windows).

However, this package's PKGBUILD lists python-raspberry-gpio here on the AUR as a mandatory dependency for building and installing this package, and the python-raspberry-gpio package does not build or install on the x86_64 arch. If python-raspberry-gpio were moved from 'depends' into 'optdepends', this package could then be built on x86_64, e.g. to be used with an FT232H, or even on any of the other platforms this package supports.

If you want to add a full list of platform-support libraries to optdepends, there seems to be python-raspberry-gpio for the Raspberry Pi (currently listed in depends), libftdi for FT232H support (in community), python-adafruit_bbio-git for the BeagleBone (in AUR; the package doesn't 'provide' the non-git python-adafruit_bbio name, so I think you have to explicitly list the git version?), and mraa for the MinnowBoard (in AUR, though I don't know what a MinnowBoard is or if ArchLinux runs on it).

But even just dropping the hard dependency on python-raspberry-gpio down to an optdepend without adding pointers to anything else would be great in terms of making this possible to use outside of a raspberry pi.

In terms of build-time vs run-time stuff, the imports for the platform-specific libraries look like they are only imported at run-time and only if the platform in question is detected (or for the FTDI chip, only if you explicitly import Adafruit_GPIO.FT232H), so none of them need to be build-time dependencies. A package built with none of them installed will still allow access to any of the (runtime-detected) GPIO platforms once the platform-specific library is added post-install.

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Python_GPIO/blob/master/Adafruit_GPIO/GPIO.py#L408

not familiar with that one, doesn't it conflict?

python-raspberry-gpio should probably be an optdepend to make it easier to build on x86_64 (for FT232H support).