pyside6-designer launcher is absent

[StarterKit]

@adrianghc said in pyside6-designer launcher is absent:

There should be no difference between pyside6-designer and designer6 installed via qt6-tools

Are you sure in this statement? I should that pyside6-designer should be some kind of script (that calls actual designer binary)... but I see that designer6 is a binary file.

[adrianghc]

There should be no difference between pyside6-designer and designer6 installed via qt6-tools
There should be no difference between the designer binary called by pyside6-designer and designer6 installed via qt6-tools

🙂

[StarterKit]

@adrianghc, okey... I still have some doubts but I should give it a try :) - will try to create simple widget next week

[adrianghc]

I just checked and while not the Arch package, the designer and assistant binaries are identical between the full Qt installation (from the Qt Online Installer) and PySide from pip on my system. 👍

Happy holidays, and good luck with the widgets next week. 🙂

[StarterKit]

@adrianghc Merry Christmas to you! :)
But my custom widget jorney isn't successful so far... What I did:

1. Starting from this page I took Task Menu Extension (Designer) example.
2. As there was no any register*.py file with registerCustomWidget() call I decided to create my own. As DOM_XML is already defined in tictactoeplugin.py my file is pretty simple:

from tictactoeplugin import TicTacToePlugin, DOM_XML

import QtDesigner

QPyDesignerCustomWidgetCollection.registerCustomWidget(TicTacToePlugin, module="tictactoeplugin",
                                                       tool_tip="Custom Widget", xml=DOM_XML)

3. I set PYSIDE_DESIGNER_PLUGINS environment variable to point to the directory with example. And then ran designer6 from the same command line. The result is nothing, no new widgets are visible in Widget Box :(
4. As "Troubleshooting the Qt Designer Plugin" section says I went to Help/About Plugins menu and there is an error indeed:
   Cannot load library /usr/lib/qt6/plugins/designer/libPySidePlugin.so: (/usr/lib/qt6/plugins/designer/libPySidePlugin.so: undefined symbol: PyImport_AddModule)
   The library itself is present in my filesystem:

[user@pc designer]$ file /usr/lib/qt6/plugins/designer/libPySidePlugin.so
/usr/lib/qt6/plugins/designer/libPySidePlugin.so: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, BuildID[sha1]=8cf43238963aab8d4f447e10d026898855e005f4, stripped

From the name of file I see that error is related with PySide so I strongly suspect that I need to fix it before any further attempts... But I have no idea what I may do to fix it...
My only suspect is - this part of manual was missed when Arch-package was compiled:
When building Qt for Python, be sure to set the --standalone option for the plugin to be properly installed.
as /usr/lib/qt6/plugins/designer/libPySidePlugin.so is owned by pyside6 6.4.1-2

[StarterKit]

Meanwhile I tried the same on Windows.
Plugin was loaded successfully and appeared in new Custom widgets tab of Widget Box.
Menu Help/About Plugins shows that PySidePlugin.dll was loaded successully and TicTacToe appeared under it.

So it appears to be a problem of Arch Linux setup...

[StarterKit]

The story continues so I would like to keep this topic updated.
The problem with libPySidePlugin.so import was indeed specific to pyside6 package of Arch Linux and fix was done in pyside6 6.5.1.1-2 release yesterday.

Now there are no errors in Help/About Plugins menu but there is an error in console instead:

[user@pc]$ PYSIDE_DESIGNER_PLUGINS=/home/projects/widget_plugins/ 
[user@pc]$ export PYSIDE_DESIGNER_PLUGINS 
[user@pc]$ designer6 
PySide6/__init__.py: Unable to import Shiboken from /home/projects/widget_plugins, /usr/lib/python311.zip, /usr/lib/python3.11, /usr/lib/python3.11/lib-dynload, /usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages 
qt.pysideplugin: Error running /home/projects/widget_plugins/register_designer_plugins.py: /usr/lib/python3.11/lib-dynload/binascii.cpython-311-x86_64-linux-gnu.so: undefined symbol: _PyUnicode_Ready 
qt.pysideplugin: No instance of QPyDesignerCustomWidgetCollection was found.

It prevents plugin from loading and seems to be a PySide bug...

[StarterKit]

And finally it was found that pyside6-designer is included in PySide6-Essentials package that seems to be absent for Arch Linux but was installed on my Windows OS.

So this is a solution for Linux - you need to install PySide6-Essentials (for Arch Linux it was fixed in package pyside6 6.5.1.1-3)

But the wrapper itself is rather simple so it appears to be useful even without installation:

import re
import sys
from PySide6.scripts.pyside_tool import designer
if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.argv[0] = re.sub(r'(-script\.pyw|\.exe)?$', '', sys.argv[0])
    sys.exit(designer())

[CristianMaureira]

@StarterKit The main issue here was that the packages provided by different OS are adapted for their needs. We ship Qt for Python officially in wheels, so we expect that the use case is that you create a virtual environment, and pip install pyside6 there and develop your application. The PySide that come in Arch, and other distros don't have a similar structure nor the same goal for users, so I'd always recommend you not to install Python module system-wide and keep them in your virtual environments.

[StarterKit]

Hi @CristianMaureira, yes this is clear.
But it is much more convenient to have all your packages managed by a single packet manager. This is the reason why I prefer to use system-specific packages in case of Arch.
So as result Arch package was improved and I think it is an acceptable outcome.