McMillan Installer vs. Python 2.4

[Simon John]

mrmak... at cox.net wrote:

> 1. Does anyone know why McMillan Installer 5b5 does not work with
> Python 2.4 under Linux (works with Python 2.3 just fine), and how to
> fix it?

I expect so.

> 2. Will anyone be picking up the maintenance and development ball for
> McMillan Installer?

There was a 6a2 release for Linux and Windows, but I don't think
anyone's developing it further.

> 3. Is there another, better-supported solution for distributing a
> Python executable under Linux/Unix/AIX?  A single-file solution (ala
> Installer's '--onefile') is a requirement for me.

cx_Freeze is good, but makes multiple files, if you need single file
you could just make the files into an RPM or simply tar.bz2 them up,
then your installation is just one file, extracted to many (still just
one directory....)

> 4. Installer supports the use of upx for those platforms that support
> it.  AIX does not.  Does anyone have any other solutions for
> compressing a Python executable which still leaves that executable
> executable?  Believe it or not, the biggest impediment to my using
> Python at work is the enormous size of the executable. (Installing
> Python itself on the target platforms is not allowed).

I don't particularly like the way UPX works, it uses more memory in the
end anyway, and disk space is cheaper. You could use strip and python
--OO to remove docstrings etc.

I've written a couple of pretty complex GUI applications and have never
seen them build to anything more than about 7Mb for wxPython or about
3Mb for PyQt.

You could just distribute the source and use movpy as the interpreter.