[Pythonmac-SIG] Is Python right for what I want to do?

[Chris Barker]

Kevin Ollivier wrote:
> On Aug 15, 2004, at 11:02 AM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>> On Aug 15, 2004, at 12:46 PM, Rodney Somerstein wrote:

>>> It seems that I might now be able to produce a double-clickable 
>>> application with a simple installer that could be used cross-platform.

Th double-clickable application and installer will be platform specific, 
i.e. one for each platform. However, building them all can be automated. 
someone on this list posted a link to their project that uses a script 
to build packages for Windows, Linux and Mac, all with different tools,. 
but all automated. I can't find the note right now, but with some 
digging you should be able to.

You also might want to look at:

http://wiki.wxpython.org/index.cgi/CreatingStandaloneExecutables

It could use some updating, but it's a start.

>> On Linux you pretty much just 
>> have to hope the user is smart enough to figure out the dependencies 
>> (unless you do per-distro packaging).
> 
> Just to add, this really is the case when packaging anything on Linux, 
> so this isn't really a specific minus against Python but rather an issue 
> with the whole "mix and match" of components philosophy on Linux. It's 
> the primary thing that keeps me from building Linux packages - I'd need 
> to do them on a distro-by-distro basis, and have to learn several 
> different packaging formats in the process.

That's not entirely true. You can include as many libraries as you want 
with your package, and the more you do, the fewer the dependencies will 
be. However, most Linux users are pretty sophisticated, so giving a list 
of dependencies and links to where you can get them is usually good enough.

I found setting up bundlebuilder to build a wxPython app to be a pain, 
but it really only took me a dew hours, and once you've done it once, 
it's done until you upgrade wxPython, so while annoying, it's really not 
that big a deal. Which is probably why no one has built a better 
bundlebuilder yet.

-Chris



-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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