Can I haz libfoo

In my last job I had to do a complex Python script for merging several git histories into one. I used Python because I needed to do a lot of high level stuff I was sure bash would be a pain to use, like building trees and traversing them. My options for managing the underlaying git repositories were two: either do an ugly hack to execute git and parse its output; or use the ugly hack that already exists, called GitPython. The first was not an option, and the second meant that in some corner cases I had to rely on it just to execute particular git invocations. It was not pleasant, but it somehow worked.

While developing ayrton I'm using paramiko as the ssh client for implementing semi transparent remote code execution. The problem I have with it is that it's mostly aimed at executing commands almost blindly, with not much interaction. It only makes sense: its main client code is fabric, which mostly uses it in that context. ayrton aims to have a ssh client as transparent as the original openssh client, but bugs like this and this are in the way.

What those two situations have in common? Well, there are two incomplete Python libraries to emulate an existing program. At least in the case of GitPython they have a backdoor to call git directly. My complaint is not their incompleteness, far from it, but the fact that they have to do it from scratch. It's because of that that they're incomplete.

Take ayrton, for instance. It's mostly an executable that serves as an interpreter for scripts written in that language (dialect?), but it's implementation is so that the executable itself barely handles command line options and calls a library. That library implements everything that ayrton does for interpreting the language, to the point where most unit tests are using ayrton library for executing ayrton scripts. ayrton is not alone, others do similarly: fades, and at some point all those other Python modules like timeit or unittest.

So that's my wish for these Christmas, or Three Wise Men day¹, or my birthday next month; I would even accept it as an Easter Egg: have all these complex pieces of software implemented mainly as a public library (even if the API changed a lot, but that right now should be fairly stable) and very thin frontends as executables. I wish for libgit and libssh and their Python bindings.