PyWin32 installer question

[Paul Moore]

On 28 December 2017 at 17:49, Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> pip install py2exe_py2 pypiwin32 Pillow lockfile
> Collecting py2exe_py2
> Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement py2exe_py2
> (from versions: )
>
> That error message isn't telling me much about why the requirement
> isn't satisfied.
>
> The name of the wheel file suggests that it's architecture-independent:
>
> py2exe_py2-0.6.9-cp27-none-win32.whl
>
> Any idea what it's complaining about?

That's not an architecture-independent file. The Wheel spec gives all
the details, but "cp27" (as opposed to "py27") means it's CPython only
(which usually means it's got a C extension) and "win32" is 32-bit
only ("win_amd64" is the tag for 64-bit Windows). So the problem is
that the py2exe_py2 maintainer doesn't supply a 64-bit build. You
could ask the maintainers if they could supply a 64-bit build. You may
be able to build your own copy, but without a Windows system, doing so
on Appveyor will be a real pain. Another option is to use Christoph
Gohlke's builds, from
https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#py2exe - you have to
download the wheel file manually (the site doesn't support automated
downloads) and then upload it to Appveyor somehow (maybe by keeping a
copy of the wheel in the project repo). Also the version there is
0.6.10a1 which looks like an alpha rather than the last official
release. So I guess there may be issues with that. Worst case scenario
would be to switch to something other than py2exe - cx_Freeze seems
similar and pretty good, and it *does* ship 64-bit Python 2.7 wheels.
But that's obviously a non-trivial task.

Welcome to the bad old days of trying to find Windows binaries for
Python packages :-( I'd strongly recommend moving to Python 3, as the
situation is immensely improved there - most projects ship Python 3
binary wheels, and "pip install" just works in many cases. But I
appreciate that doesn't help much for you. Sorry - hopefully one of
the other options above will help.

Paul