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[Paul Boddie]

Fuzzyman wrote:
> Paul Boddie wrote:
> > Fuzzyman wrote:
> >
> > > I never understand the knee-jerk reaction on this mailing list to
> > > answer people who ask this question by telling them they don't really
> > > want to do it...

Note your choice of words: "don't really want to do it".

[...]

> If you distribute applications with py2exe then your application is no
> longer dependent on the installed version of Python.

But there are numerous other things that might stop whatever binary it
is from working over longer periods of time. Besides, py2exe
executables don't exactly exhibit various typical benefits of normal
Python programs such as being able to run on more than one platform,
unless you recommend that everyone runs those applications in some kind
of Windows virtualisation solution.

> The question keeps getting asked because a lot of new programmers are
> looking to create programs that they will sell. A lot of these will be
> good programmers, and some of the software will be successful. Telling
> them 'you can't do that with Python', does no good to Python itself.

But many people admit that solutions do exist, notably py2exe and other
tools which do very similar things but for more than one platform (and
have done so for at least a decade). Now you did say that people are
being made to feel that they "don't really want to do it", but that's a
very different thing from being told that they "can't do that with
Python".

Personally, I'd rather people chose not to do such things with Python,
for various reasons including the inability of the end-user to study or
fix bugs in the code or to take advantage of various well-known
benefits of the Python language, library and runtime. But I do admit
that they at least can achieve some level of obfuscation or
"protection" for such endeavours (and a suitably-phrased Web search
will provide established solutions for doing just that).

Paul