Not installing interpreter on local machine

[David Bolen]

shezafd at yahoo.com (Daphna Shezaf) writes:

> I am a python enthusiast and have been programming around in python
> for sometime. I came up with the idea to use python for internal
> scripts we need in my company (for example: build scripts).
> That's nice (I think), but it will be hard to convince people that
> python interpreter should be installed on every machine around.
> Do you think it will be possible to install the interpreter on a
> single server, so that people will actually run their scripts on this
> server? Is it possible (and how), for the script to run a program on a
> different machine (We're using windows 2000 LAN)? Any other helpful
> hints?

It should be just fine if you make a Python installation on the
network and then have people refer to it via a network use or even
with a direct UNC.  The script will still execute locally, but it'll
be loading the interpreter and library modules from the network
location.

For the most transparency, all that needs to be done (and this can be
done by a wrapper script) is to include that location in the local
path (including the DLLs subdirectory of the installation unless you
move the DLLs out to the root).  Then stick your python##.dll into
that same directory as opposed to winnt\system32.

The only piece that I've had trouble doing this way is win32com
support since it does some strange things with its module definitions
(using the local registry) and has some dependency on some core DLLs
being in the system directory.  Or at least I haven't figured out how
to cleanly avoid that yet.

--
-- David
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