crossplatform py2exe - would it be useful?

[Oren Tirosh]

On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 08:36:20PM +0200, Thomas Heller wrote:
> I'm currently working on a new version of py2exe, which will require
> Python 2.3 and later, because it uses the zipimport mechanism.

Now that zipimport is part of Python the code required for bootstrapping 
a py2exe runtime is just:

myscript -c "import sys; sys.path.insert(0, sys.executable); import foo"

This reduces the difference between the custom interpreter supplied with 
py2exe and the standard interpreter to just a few lines of C.

The obvious question is - why not go all the way and put this little
hook into the standard Python distribution? This way py2exe could be a 
platform-independent pure Python application. In fact, py2exe wouldn't 
actually be necessary because anyone could create a zip file manually and 
append it to the executable but it's more convenient to have a tool that 
automates the process and finds the required dependencies.

    Oren