[Pythonmac-SIG] py2app failure with framework build of 2.7

[Nat Echols]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 5:46 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
>> Replying to my own post: after sending this, I read the section in the
>> documentation about "alias mode".  This seems to work fine, and
>> produces an app that is 50KB instead of nearly 9MB.  Since I'm running
>> this script as part of a complicated build and installation process,
>> and the path to the interpreter and all modules is frozen by the time
>> I need to make my app, it would seem that alias mode should work fine
>> for actually *deploying* my software.  Is there any drawback to doing
>> this?
>
> An alias mode build contains symlinks to the python files in your application, and is therefore not a useful way to deploy.

It's still not totally clear to me if this is really a drawback in my
case.  The software distribution in question is a huge (~2GB) mess
originally written for Unix systems, and the installation process is
somewhat... inelegant.  Users have a choice of a) running a shell
script which installs to a destination of their choice, and runs the
py2app script at the end (after the new location is made permanent),
or b) running a .pkg which installs in /Applications, which includes
the pre-built .app file.  In the first case, I'm pretty certain the
symlinks won't be a problem.  I'm not sure about the second - will
packagemaker screw these up?  The original paths will be accurate but
I have to move stuff around as part of the packaging process, and I
have no idea what happens internally.

thanks,
Nat