Distributing applications that use 3rd party modules

[eliben]

Hello,

I'm getting into Python now after years of Perl, and as part of my
research I must understand how to do some common tasks I need.

I have a bunch of Windows PCs at work to which I want to distribute an
application I've developed on my PC. All these PCs have Python 2.5
installed.

If my application contains only code I've developed, I simply zip its
directory with .py files and send it to everyone, who can then use it
by running the entry-point .py file. However, what if I've installed
some 3rd party modules on my PC, and my application uses them (for
example pyparsing, PiYAML and some others) ? I don't want to manually
install all these packages (there may be dozens of them) on all those
PCs (there may be dozens of those too). What is the best method I can
use ? Naturally, I want all the non-standard packages my app uses to
be detected automatically and collected into some kind of convenient
distributable that is easy to pass around and run.

I'm aware of py2exe - tried it and it works fine. But it creates huge
executables, and I don't want to distribute those all the time. I much
prefer a zipped directory of .py scripts that takes some 10s of KBs.

Thanks in advance,
Eli