[Ironpython-users] IronPython Merge Modules for Windows

[Jeff Hardy]

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 7:41 AM, Cesar Mello <cmello at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've noticed IronRuby has merge modules available. Would this be the
> recommended way to redistribute IronPython?
>
> Now I need to embed IronPython in our product's installer. (This is still a
> prototype). Any advices about this? Probably that's an effort that can be
> shared, so instead of developing proprietary installation components I may
> contribute work on generic merge modules.

If you've already got a bootstrapper, I would just but IronPython's
MSI in there. Merge modules are really fragile and tend to break in
weird ways, so I don't build them for IronPython (I refactored IP's
MSI builds, so that's why they're different from IR's). The
recommendation from MS seems to be to use full MSIs and chain them
using a bootstrapper.

One thing to watch for is that a user could upgrade IP and cause your
app to be running against a new version. I try to make sure that
upgrades shouldn't break anything for just that reason, but it does
happen. The only way around this would be to build IP yourself, with a
different signing key or AssemblyVersion, and ship that version with
your app.

- Jeff