Packing DiME

[jinningwang]

Without packing DiME as a package, it is challenging to install necessary DiME dependencies for users.

DiME has the following dependencies build-essential, autotools-dev, autoconf, and libev-dev, to support the installation of OpenSSL, zlib, and Jansson.

To follow the installation style of ANDES and AMS, it can be better to pack a C project with the necessary dependencies and publish it on Conda and PyPI.

The installation of DiME is expected to be simple, like conda install dime or pip install dime.

Then starting a DiME server in the command line can be like this:

dime --path /tmp/dime --port 8818

Similarly, using DiME in Python can be like this:

import dime

# NOTE: start a DiME server
server = dime.server(path='/tmp/dime', port=8818)

# NOTE: start a DiME client and join a server
client = dime.client(protocol, varargin)
client.join(server)
...

With this feature, we can improve the usability of DiME and integrate AGVis as a built-in visualizer for ANDES and AMS.

Here are some possible references for packing DiME:
Conda documentation on creating and publishing packages
PyPI documentation on creating and publishing packages
Blog post on publishing C libraries on Conda and PyPI
Github repository with example setup.py files for packaging C projects
Conda-forge documentation on building and uploading packages
PyPI documentation on using twine to upload packages

See Interactive use through Python code for more discussion.