[Distutils] py2exe has a new maintainer

[Jimmy Retzlaff]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 05:16 PM 10/4/2005 -0700, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> >On the other hand, setuptools/eggs solves a lot of these problems
> >(given appropriate metadata), so I'd target integration with that
> >first and then bring in the "legacy" support that py2app does pretty
> >well.  Requiring appropriate metadata from the packages themselves
> >has a much brighter future than maintaining an external "quirks"
> >infrastructure in (each) application packager.

I agree with Bob here. I know that in the past I've wanted to add
metadata to packages I distribute to make them work better with py2exe
(e.g. automatically including DLLs accessed through ctypes), so I think
this is the right approach.

> Also, setuptools supports adding setup() keywords and commands in a
more
> extensible way than subclassing Distribution, so there's no need to
> maintain a bunch of code to hook into the distutils if you just plug
in
> with setuptools.  See:
> 
> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#creating-distutils-
> extensions
> 
> At this point, the easy_install command is capable of dumping all the
> needed eggs and any generated wrapper scripts into a target
> directory.  What it doesn't have is:
> 
> * frontend wrappers/packaging to actually build the .exe or app and
> resources
> 
> * module-finding or stdlib packaging to locate and bundle the needed
> portion of the standard library
> 
> It would be cool if these things could be integrated in such a way
that a
> single setup() could be used to create both an OS X application and a
> Windows .exe.  As it happens, setuptools supports specifying
additional
> eggs needed to run a particular setup command, so we can actually
delay
> the
> requirement of the egg containing py2exe or py2app until somebody
actually
> requests the command.

That would be awesome. There might be a few platform specific bits that
need to be specified, but it would be nice to let the executable
packagers focus on the job of creating a platform specific executable.

> On the other hand, it's also possible that the metadata could be
bundled
> into the egg metadata directory, which would then make it possible to
have
> external bundling tools that just use the eggs to build the
application,
> without needing to run the setup script at all.

One of my thoughts for py2exe has been a small GUI tool that helps
people new to distutils/py2exe to create (and maybe maintain) a setup
script graphically. A lot of people who just want to bundle one small
utility seem to get confused about options on the command line vs. in
parameters and that type of thing. With what you are describing, this
could degenerate into just a builder tool, and any GUI could be applied
further upstream where more of the metadata lives. If enough of the
metadata lives in the individual packages, then the options needed for
the executable builder part might be simple enough that the confusion
goes away.

Alas I won't have time for much of this for a while. I expect I'll have
my hands full getting up to speed on py2exe's internals and providing
support until I get a break from my current deadlines at work (which is
looking like December). When I get to that point, I'll try to reopen the
discussion.

Regards,
Jimmy