Wheel-reinvention with Python

[Mike Meyer]

Cliff Wells <cliff at develix.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 20:17 -0400, Mike Meyer wrote:
>
>> Um - you're not answering the question I asked. I asked "What app do I
>> use to bundle my applications for Unix, ala py2exe (or whatever it is)
>> for Windows?" You're telling me how to install wxPython on those
>> platforms.
>> I know how to install wxPython. What I want to know is how to build an
>> application bundle for all those Unix systems for a Python app I use
>> that includes wxPython - or any other third party libraries I may be
>> using.
>
> Sorry, I assumed you'd know about distutils:

Cliff, please quit being an ass. You keep assuming that because some
tool isn't the answer to my question that I don't know about
it. That's simply rude. It would be *much* more polite to ask "What's
wrong with distutils" rather than saying "So you don't know about
distutils."

> http://www.python.org/doc/current/dist/
> http://www.python.org/doc/current/dist/built-dist.html
>
> distutils can go so far as to build an rpm for you, but you'll need to
> package things like .debs yourself.

I've very familiar with distutils. It doesn't do what I asked for, in
that it only bundles up *my* code. It doesn't bundle the things I
depend on the way py2exe does. It's patently *not* the answer to the
question I asked.

For those who want .deb's out of distutils, there's a PR on
sourceforge that includes a patch to make it generate .debs that works
quite well.

Of course, anyone who built a .deb (or an RPM, or a port, or whatever)
that bundled up everything it needed would be doing *the wrong
thing*. Those formats are designed for packaging single distributions,
not applications. They include dependency information that is used to
fetch the dependencies and install them. From my standpoint, the
problem here is that you then have to get the dependencies into the
repository before you can put your application there and have it
work. For instance, my port of bicyclerepairman is stuck at an old
version because I haven't gotten a port PyMac accepted yet (it also
has to do with bugs in the xemacs port, but that's another story).

I'm surprised you haven't mentioned eggs yet. Those work across all
the platforms I named. Of course, they aren't the answer to my
question either, because, like PRMs et al, they only reference
external dependencies, they don't include them.


         <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.