shipping a python app

[Roy Smith]

I've been given a task to write a small gui-based app which needs to
run on both NT and Unix platforms.  About all I know about NT is how
to spell it, and I've heard it's got some cool flight simulator games.

The scope of the development project rules out C/C++/Java because of
extremely limited development and test time available.  In most
peoples' minds, that means doing it in TCL/Tk, since it's "available
everywhere".

I'd love to write this in python/Tkinter, but it'll be a bit of an
uphill battle to convince management.  While I do a lot of python
development for internal tools, my company doesn't currently ship any
python-based products because of the impression that it's not widely
supported.

Then it turns out that for the existing TCL/Tk apps we ship, we don't
even depend on finding a pre-installed interpreter.  It might not be
there, it might be broken, it might be the wrong version, it might not
have the right libraries, etc, etc.  Turns out we package and ship a
TCL interpreter right in our distribution package, so the "available
everywhere" argument becomes a bit of a red herring.

So, that brings us around to what, exactly, would be involved in
shipping a stand-alone python app?  All my python development so far
has assumed that the run-time environment already exists, or can be
installed by the user.  That will not be the case here.  We'll need to
assume that nothing is there and package up whatever we'll need.  I'm
sure people have done this before.  Anybody willing to share your
experiences?

Fortunately, for this particular app, there's no intellectual property
being protected so we don't care if the source code is visible.