[Distutils] Thinking about a Windows Installer

[Thomas Heller]

Hi,

I'm currently thinking about a bdist_winexe command for distutils.
(Is there a better name?)

This command will create a single executable file similar to those
created with Wise or Installshield installers (except that you don't
need to have these _commercial_ programs installed).

This exe-File consists of a C-program embedding python, appended
is a zip-compatible archive of the modules to distribute, the setup.py
script, as well as an ini-file "setup.ini" or something like that which
contains the distribution meta-data in a format easily readable by
the C-program.

This exe-File, when run, simply unpacks the archive into a temporary
directory, displays a nice GUI, runs the setup.py script, and cleans
up the temp-dir.

(The design is inspired by previous work: Gordons installer, squeeze
and whatever)

Comments?

Thomas Heller