McMillan installer R5 can't find Windows

[David Bolen]

Alexander Skwar <lists.ASkwar at email-server.info> writes:

> Hello!
> 
> I'm trying to get the McMillan installer to work.  I downloaded
> the release b4 file installer_5b4.zip and unpacked it 
> somewhere.  When I run "python Configure.py", I get:
> 
> C:\Downloads\System\Python\installer_5b4\Installer>python Configure.py
> I: computing EXE_dependencies
> W: Cannot determine your Windows or System directories
> W: Please add them to your PATH if .dlls are not found

It's not quite as clear a message as it could be, but this refers to
the installer not being able to ask Windows itself what its system
path is.  The installer isn't guessing at directories like 'Windows'
or 'WINNT' although those will be most common, nor does it scan
drives.

In order to check it uses the win32api module, which is part of the
win32 extensions package by Mark Hammond.  It sounds like you have a
Python installation but haven't installed the extensions.  Anything in
your PATH will automatically be searched for DLLs anyway, so as the
message says unless it can't find a DLL you're still ok.

You can get rid of the message by installing the win32all package,
which to be honest, is definitely worth doing on Win32 platforms.  It
comes automatically with the ActiveState Python distribution, but can
be added to any other Python installation by downloading it from
Mark's Win32 pages (http://starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/win32/).

> Next I created a .spec file for the application I'm writing.  
> In the .spec file, I added a "icon = 'xbox-icon.ico'"
> statement to the exe class to set an icon.  When I then
> run "python Build.py my.spec" to build the exe, I get the
> following error:
> 
> ignoring icon and version resources = platform not capable
> 
> So I suppose that the Installer really did not find my 
> Windows.  

Not quite, although the root cause is the same.  In order to install
an icon resource into the resulting executable, the installer has to
use other functions from the same win32 extensions package.  So the
fact that you don't have the extensions module made the installer
(during the Configure process) turn off that capability.

Typically you'd get this sort of message if running on a Linux system,
so this lets you use a single spec file cross-platform, and it just
ignores the Windowisms (the resources) on the other platforms.

--
-- David
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