[CI test] Integrate secp256k1proto as subtree (using ugly import hack)

[theStack]

This is a first approach of moving the secp256k1proto folder to an external package (living at https://github.com/theStack/secp256k1proto-playground currently, created with the uv package manager) and integrating it as git-subtree here [1]:

$ git subtree add --prefix=python/secp256k1proto --squash https://github.com/theStack/secp256k1proto-playground master

The import rename hack in the chilldkg_ref files to reflect the directory structure is ugly. Searching for alternatives currently.

[1] proposed solution 1 in https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/HE3HSnGTpoQ

[real-or-random]

Nice!

The import rename hack in the chilldkg_ref files to reflect the directory structure is ugly. Searching for alternatives currently.

I think you want something like this: https://github.com/BlockstreamResearch/bip-frost-dkg/tree/syspath, see https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/modules.html#the-module-search-path for background. It's a bit low-level, but it does the job.

This makes it possible to execute these files without a package manager. Note that chilldkg_ref is still a python "package". It's just managed manually.

It may still make sense to switch to a proper package manager in the future, as long as we make sure that you can easily execute the example and the tests. I think uv makes this somewhat easy already, but it should also be possible to make it work without uv at all. Perhaps we could detect if we're running inside uv and make the sys.path modification conditional on that. Anyway, that's future stuff.

[real-or-random]

Ah, my branch still fails if you invoke a script which is not in the current working dir. This is the way to fix it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8663119

Alternatively, we could simply tell the user to set the PYTHONPATH env variable, but I believe the sys.path thing is clean enough and it just works.

[theStack]

I think you want something like this: https://github.com/BlockstreamResearch/bip-frost-dkg/tree/syspath, see https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/modules.html#the-module-search-path for background. It's a bit low-level, but it does the job.

Thanks, that was indeed pretty much what I was looking for (seeing it now, I remember that we use the same sys.path.insert... approach in Bitcoin Core for contrib scripts that need to access test framework modules, e.g. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/d6c229d8bd4a6203a7255c140aa35c59fb20378b/contrib/signet/miner#L19).