The problem with your file structure:

[didlie]

This is a huge issue with your file structure, and almost everyone who uses github as their code source: Your dependencies are not in your repository.

Here is the first roadblock reading your code::
I download zeronet.master unzip it, and open in Atom editor.
--I enter the program in zeronet.py, and ignore the "import"s knowing they are simply required functions in known thirdparty code blocks...
--I find the update section in zeronet.py and comment it out... I don't want my app updating from your github repository.
--I move to the main.py file that is initiated in zeronet.py and discover this third party file called gevent that us used to import "monkey" --- i look around in the code base and... no gevent and no monkey.

[skwerlman]

preinstalled 3rd party deps are actually a bad thing, since it makes it difficult for users to update them. as far as getting the deps, you can just pip install -U -R requirements.txt from the root of the repo, same as any other python project. if you're worried about polluting the global package space, just use a venv

[HelloZeroNet]

Gevent and msgpack are binary modules (written in C), so you need to compile them before you can use it, so it's not possible to distribute it with the source code.

I actually completely agree with @didlie that dependencies should be in github repo. Also something to note, this does not mean that these deps cannot be updated or that you can't use pip (or some other package manager). It should be the responsibility of the programmer to update the dependencies in the repo to make sure that the new versions actually work. By storing your dependencies in the repo, this allows people to still use the code even when the places where the dependencies are usually downloaded from are down or no longer exist (cough leftpad cough).

Regarding not being able to store binary files with source code, that wouldn't be as much of a problem if we would quit using Git and use a better system, although one needs to be created first I guess, and it could reduce visibility/discoverability of the project. However, there is LFS.

[purplesyringa]

@krixano That could be some repository with submodules, right? I.e. add all the modules as links to GitHub.

@imachug No, because those repos could be deleted/down and I don't think that git keeps the files you downloaded from the submodules in with your repo while still letting you update them, if it did that, then that would be better in my opinion.

[didlie]

Yes... all dependencies should have direct references

[purplesyringa]

But at least we shouldn't clutter the main repo, so maybe we can fork the modules?

@imachug I don't think forking the modules is that much different, but it's better. Imo, the dependencies should be directly in the same folder so that if you decide to move the repo someone else, you'll still have all of it.

Basically, what I think would be the best is if there was a package manager (like npm) that stores the dependencies in a dependencies folder, and then you just track that folder in with your repo. The problem with doing this with web development (e.g. npm) is that the web has so many dependencies that it would definitely clutter up the directory and may take quite a lot of space. That's also why I think the whole climate of web development isn't very good (I mean come on, people are depending on libraries that literally have barely any lines of code - again leftpad).

[didlie]

Unlocked I archived dependencies waste time for new developers and compromise the existence of valuable projects. When projects go corporate they are destroyed by corrupting dependencies and nieve new developers waste thousands of hours searching for things they can never fix

Thinking about leftpad some more and looking at it's examples and it's source code - I find it even more stupid. Literally all it does is put spaces (or a character of choice) at beginning to make the size of the string the size that you want. The implementation looks even more stupid. They're doing some weird thing in a loop where they divide by two when all they have to do is take the length of the string minus the desired length and add that many spaces to the beginning. It makes no sense to me. It looks they are trying to do some optimization, but is that really needed for something like this?

And this is a library that so many people were using - which is even more ridiculous imo.

Okay, I'm done with that now.

[didlie]

Please put a complete list of all dependencies with links to every dependency for developers to download and create their own archives.

[didlie]

gevent and msgpack are python packages
import gevent
import msgpack

--- what happens when these python imports import different versions of the same libraries?
When I just installed Python, it gave me 3.7, that is not compatible with this repo

[HelloZeroNet]

Any version after gevent 1.0 should work on Python 2.7.x.

All non-binary dependencies are included under the lib directory. For binary we would require to include many different versions based on operating system, cpu type and python version.

When I just installed Python, it gave me 3.7, that is not compatible with this repo

Linux distros separate python2 and python3. Some of them have python default to python2 and some have python default to python3. But you can find both in each of their respective package managers. Not sure if you are on Linux or not though.