Update documention for obtaining DLL about ngspyce HOT 7 CLOSED

Same problem, I have installed ngspice 37 using chocolatey and there is no dll anywhere in the program files. I also downloaded an auxiliary zip package named ngspice-37_dll_64 from the ngspice webpage, but I am currently getting an error if I try to import directly in command line (currently I know nothing about python, just getting started):

import ngspyce
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
File "C:\Python310\lib\site-packages\ngspyce-0.1-py3.10.egg\ngspyce_init_.py", line 2, in
from .ngspyce import *
File "C:\Python310\lib\site-packages\ngspyce-0.1-py3.10.egg\ngspyce\ngspyce.py", line 3, in
from .sharedspice import *
File "C:\Python310\lib\site-packages\ngspyce-0.1-py3.10.egg\ngspyce\sharedspice.py", line 37, in
spice = CDLL('ngspice')
File "C:\Python310\lib\ctypes_init_.py", line 374, in init
self._handle = _dlopen(self._name, mode)
FileNotFoundError: Could not find module 'ngspice' (or one of its dependencies). Try using the full path with constructor syntax.

I decided to try WSL/ubuntu on windows before giving this a second try.

from ngspyce.

I don't have a Windows machine at hand, but have you tried adding the directory where the DLL is to sys.path?

sys.path.append('C:/path/to/DLL/directory')

from ngspyce.

Sorry for the long time to answer. I tried that without success using some different folder combinations, the packages I found even had different DLL versions for vscode and mingw compiled versions, and it seems there exists a sepparate/obscure distribution for the windows versions of the shared versions of ngspice that is not the same as the executable version. Since I am now working on a Docker container without any problem, I will try this later.

from ngspyce.

Is there any legal reason why the .dll can't be included in this software directly? I think that would simplify everything for everyone, and you don't have to worry about the interface becoming incompatible, etc.

from ngspyce.

In principle we could do that, but it feels dirty to package ngspice:

• users are going to be running our outdated ngspice unless we keep up with their releases.
• binaries can hide all kinds of stuff. I wouldn't want to be spreading malware because someone's PC was compromised and compiled bad binaries.

If the ngspice team are already packaging the DLL, I think we should just make it easy to find this package and point Python to it. Unfortunately I can't try stuff myself since I'm only running Linux, but feel free to discuss this with the other Windows users.

from ngspyce.

users are going to be running our outdated ngspice unless we keep up with their releases.

But isn't that good? The version of ngspice should match the version of ngspyce, so that they are guaranteed to be compatible with each other?

binaries can hide all kinds of stuff. I wouldn't want to be spreading malware because someone's PC was compromised and compiled bad binaries.

It's already getting those binaries from sourceforge and using them, what's the difference?

from ngspyce.

It's now possible to get ngspice binaries using anaconda:

conda install -c conda-forge ngspice

This installs both the executable and the shared library.

from ngspyce.