Distributing a Python program hell

[Grant Edwards]

On 2013-04-03, Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
> On 2013-04-03, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm struggling with radio hams who are trying to get my antique
>> Teletype program running.  I hate having to write instructions
>> like this:
>> 
>> [...] 
>
> Python programs can be distributed as binary-like packages, e.g.,
> www.py2exe.org.

I'd second the recommendation for for py2exe.  It's been a couple
years since I used it, but for 6-7 years before that I used it
regularly to distribute about a half-dozen different wxPython apps to
Windows users, and it worked very nicely.

It sometimes requires some effort to get the configuration tweaked
right and then adjusted so the result works on a variety of Windows
versions, but in the end it always worked great.

I usually used one of the various free "self-installer generators" to
bundle up the .exe file(s) produced by py2exe along with whatever else
was needed to go with them and make them simple to install.  [I've
forgotten which ones I used, but they all do basically the same
thing.]

I did all my development on Linux. When I boot over to Windows (on a
VM, generally) I had Cygwin installed and just ran a "make" to do all
the executable creation and bundling via command-line calls to py2exe
and self-installer utilities.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! It's a hole all the
                                  at               way to downtown Burbank!
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