Wheel-reinvention with Python

[Cliff Wells]

On Mon, 2005-08-01 at 23:49 -0400, Mike Meyer wrote:
> Cliff Wells <cliff at develix.com> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 14:58 -0400, Mike Meyer wrote:
> >> And what do I use to bundle my application for Unix? Most of the
> >> things I build get installed on Unix servers.
> > You install GUI apps on Unix *servers*?  
> 
> Yup. Thanks to the wonders of X, I can run GUI apps on servers and
> have them display on my desktop. Or my OS X laptop. I normally leave a
> gkrellm running on most of my servers.

Yes, yes.  The "wonders of X" have been known to me since around 1992.
Personally I avoid running GUI apps on my servers since they are usually
unnecessary, waste memory, and if not used properly, open the door for
security issues (for that matter, any extra piece of software installed
opens the door for potential security issues so I tend to run
stripped-down servers that only provide needed services - no fluff.
Then again "server" is a pretty broad term.  The bulk of my servers are
shared and dedicated hosting environments where paranoia is rewarded.
Your situation may be different).

> Of course, the problem under discussion isn't restricted to GUI
> apps. Anytime I use a third party library, I have to deal with how end
> users are going to get it.

Absolutely.  However GUI libraries tend to stick out a bit more since
they tend to have a larger number of dependencies plus sheer code size
and complexity makes platform-specific bugs more likely.

> > Regardless, when you say "Unix", what do you mean?  You may as well say
> > "OS" as this term has little meaning.  Linux (which flavor)?  BSD?  SCO?
> > HPUX?  OS/X?  Minix?   Whichever way, I suspect that a bit of distutils
> > hacking would solve your problem.
> 
> I think the post I replied to covered the OS X case - there's an
> application bundler available for it already.

Yes, I've used it to bundle wxPython apps on 10.3.

> I want distributions that will work on all three major BSD variants
> and most Linux distrubtions - in particular, anything that uses deb's,
> rpm's or emerge. If you want to choose one in particular, try ubuntu
> Linux.

OpenBSD: in portage
FreeBSD: in portage
386BSD: don't know... does anyone still use this?
NetBSD: included AFAICT
Fedora: rpms available
Debian: debs available
Ubuntu: included
Gentoo: in portage
OS/X:  available on wxpython.org

FWIW, much of this info I found in less than 5 minutes using Google.  I
suppose with a little persistence you could have discovered it for
yourself.

Here's your Ubuntu instructions:
http://wiki.wxpython.org/index.cgi/wxPython_20with_20Ubuntu

Of course, if you are distributing end-user software by requiring users
to install 3rd party packages themselves, then I hope you are
distributing open source software.  If it's a commercial/closed-source
app you'll do far better by simply packaging all the requirements into
the installer and installing it within the application's directory tree
(this solves a lot of problems with version conflicts and user
confusion).

In my experience, binary packages work best for Windows and OS/X, and
source distributions work best for Linux (mostly because building
packages for Linux is a varied and sometimes painful process. Further
Linux truly works best as a source-based system: you cannot always
depend on ABI compatibility across versions of libraries - *usually* you
can but... caveat emptor).

Regards,
Cliff

-- 
cliff at develix.com
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