[Python-Dev] Re: hook for standalone executable

[John J Lee]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2003, Gordon McMillan wrote:
[...]
> It may be a surprise to the developer community, but there are
> a lot of Unix users who are not developers and do not have
> root priveleges on their machines. These people want to install
> to ~/bin and don't particularly care what the install looks like.
>
> In this country it's usually analysts, statisticians and scientists.
> In other countries where MS is not so popular, it's anybody.
[...]

Missed this discussion...

A concrete example: the Pybliographer project (bibliographic database
manager).  Pyblio has had real problems with buggy shared libraries and
Python & library versioning, and would certainly benefit from this kind of
thing.

The obvious problem with rpm / deb packages is that, in reality, a Redhat
rpm isn't always portable to a SuSe system, etc. (there are a whole lot of
GNU/Linux distributions out there, especially when you consider the rapid
release schedule of many distributions!).  Single-file executables
eliminate that problem (though of course having a single executable
doesn't preclude packaging in an rpm / deb -- makes it trivial to make
portable packages, in fact).  'Proper' binary packages certainly have
their place, but so do one-file executables, IMHO.

Gordon's point about people outside North America, Western / Central
Europe and Oz / NZ is very important -- that group of users certainly
isn't going to shrink!


John