Which version of MSVC?90.DLL's to distribute with Python 2.6 based Py2exe executables?

[Jonathan Hartley]

On Dec 29, 2:24 pm, Jonathan Hartley <tart... at tartley.com> wrote:
> On Dec 27, 1:51 pm, pyt... at bdurham.com wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hi Martin,
>
> > > You'll need to include Microsoft.VC90.CRT.manifest and msvcr90.dll.
>
> > Thank you for your answers. From my research and testing on this topic:
>
> > 1. Can I safely place these 2 files in the same folder as my Py2exe
> > generated EXE file or do I need to place the MSVCR90.DLL file in a
> > specially named sub-folder?
>
> > 2. Do I need to rename the Microsoft.VC90.CRT.manifest file to
> > myapp.exe.manifest or can I leave it named as is?
>
> > 3. Do I need to customize the contents of the
> > Microsoft.VC90.CRT.manifest file for my EXE?
>
> > I've been experimenting with different answers to the above questions
> > and multiple approaches seems to work. I suspect this is because all the
> > workstations I have access to for testing already have the full set of
> > MSVC*90.DLL's installed - and not because my multiple tests really work.
>
> > Thanks so much for your help!
>
> > Malcolm
>
> I just created a VM containing a bare-bones install of Windows XP,
> precisely so that I can reproduce the errors my users see when
> MSVCR90.DLL is not installed.
>
> It sounds like the wisest course of action is for me to use
> vcredist_x86.exe to install the required MSVC runtime on the user's
> machine (as opposed to trying to distribute MSVCR90.DLL with my
> application.) I can be sure that I have rights to distribute this, and
> I don't have to understand side-by-side DLL installation, and I'm
> delegating any tricky decisions to Microsoft, who are presumably best
> qualified to judge things like: what to do if other versions of the
> DLLs are already installed; how to register them to be shared between
> multiple applications; whether to update them if Windows Update
> decrees it, etc)
>
> I'm going to try to run vcredist_x86.exe automatically (as opposed to
> asking my users to download and run it manually). I don't currently
> have any installer, so I'm going to run vcredist_x86.exe on my
> application start-up. Some logic like this seems to do this trick:
>
>     if platform.system() == 'Windows':
>         command = [path.join('lib', 'vcredist_x86.exe'), '/q']
>         retcode = subprocess.call(command)
>         if retcode != 0:
>             sys.stderr.write(
>                 'Return value %d from vcredist_x86.exe\n' %
> (retcode,))
>
> This seems to work. My py2exe program will now run out of the box on a
> bare-bones Windows XP install. (note: running 'vcredist_x86.exe /qu'
> will uninstall the DLLs again)
>
> However, this takes a few seconds to run. Is there a sensible way for
> me to only run this if the required DLL is not already installed? How
> should I be detecting that?
>
> Also: Will this work on 64 bit machines? Or do I not need to worry
> about that?


I was fooling myself with sloppy testing, this doesn't work at all.
Obviously enough.

If the DLLs aren't installed, then my program can't be launched, and
can't bootstrap itself by installing the required DLL's.

I guess I really need an installer. Oh well.