MLIR Python binding is not available through apt

[kamleshbhalui]

During the MLIR build, you can enable Python bindings by setting
-DMLIR_ENABLE_BINDINGS_PYTHON=ON.
However, after installing mlir-dev via apt, the shared libraries are present but the Python module isn’t included. There’s also no standalone package (e.g. python3-mlir) available. It looks like the Python bindings were omitted—this should be fixed.

cc: @sylvestre

[llvmbot]

@llvm/issue-subscribers-mlir-python

Author: Kamlesh Kumar (kamleshbhalui)

During the MLIR build, you can enable Python bindings by setting `-DMLIR_ENABLE_BINDINGS_PYTHON=ON`. However, after installing mlir-dev via apt, the shared libraries are present but the Python module isn’t included. There’s also no standalone package (e.g. `python3-mlir`) available. It looks like the Python bindings were omitted—this should be fixed.

cc: @sylvestre

[makslevental]

Unfortunately this isn't really doable in a reasonable way because the bindings would be for only one version of Python. What we need to do is actually distribute a separate MLIRPythonBindings-config.cmake so that people can then easily build/rebuild from distros.

In addition we should probably also be always distributed the sources irrespective of whether the binding libs etc were themselves built.

[kamleshbhalui]

@makslevental python bindings for clang and lldb seems available through apt. does mlir bindings works differently than those of clang and lldb?

[makslevental]

does mlir bindings works differently than those of clang and lldb?

i don't know about lldb (i think it uses swig and i don't know how swig works) but the clang python bindings are ctypes bindings which have no "compile" component (it's just python scripts that access clang through clang's CAPI). mlir's python bindings use pybind/nanobind which need to be compiled for a specific version of python (modulo python's recent "stable API" stuff).

[kamleshbhalui]

understood, thank you!