[Pythonmac-SIG] Bundlebuilder--why remove it?

[Christopher Barker]

Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>>> What really should be done is restart py2app development,
>> Unless PyInstaller is looking good -- there may be an advantage to a code base with more people working on it. Mac folks would still need to do the Mac-specific stuff, but not the rest of it. bbFreeze isn't bad, either, but needs more work -- I don't think it ever could produce an App bundle.
> 
> PyInstaller is GPL licensed and I am therefore not interested.

May I ask why? I understand for libraries, but PyInstaller is a stand 
alone -- you'd use it, rather than including it with something you 
produce. It could therefore be used for applications released under any 
license (though we can't freely borrow code -- darn). Unless in includes 
GPL's code in our bundle, which would be problem. However, from their FAQ:

"""
* If I use PyInstaller for my commercial Python application, will I have 
to distribute my source code as well?

Absolutely not. You can ship the executables created with PyInstaller 
with whatever license you want.
"""

which looks reasonable to me.

It still may not be a great technical solution, though.

>>> starting  with automated tests

> There probably should be unittests at some point, but I'm more
> interested in functional/acceptence test style tests where every
> testcase builds an application bundle (or plugin bundle) and verifies
> that the result is correct. The verification step should idealy run
> the application to check that it works instead of only checking if
> files are present in the bundle.

Checking if it really works is tough -- but yes, it should at least test 
that it starts up without error. I think we could get a long way by 
having each test app produce a little output or something when run -- 
then at least that could be easily tested.

I'll try to get a start on this. I have a couple test apps already that 
I've written just for this purpose - I just need to but a test framework 
around them.

> Quad architecture is pretty low on my list,

I wonder about this -- PPC macs are getting pretty old in the tooth -- 
when was the last one sold? I now that I'm getting pretty sick of 
supporting it -- macports is hardly getting tested on it, etc. I'm doing 
it now, as we're running a bunch of PPC macs here, but as soon as we can 
get permission(another ugly story), we'll all be getting new Intel macs, 
and I'll be able to dump PPC support for our in-house stuff. At which 
point I'll have a hard time finding any energy for working on PPC (plus 
I won't have one to test on).

So maybe looking to the future -- PPC is dead.

Also, my bundles are getting really, really huge as it is -- I'm not 
sure i want to go there with a quad build!

> I have the files from Kevin to reproduce the issue but little time to work on py2app. 

Any idea how big a deal it is? If BundleBuilder supports it, then it's 
got to be possible!

Kevin Walzer wrote:
> I've done a bit more digging into the other alternatives. bbfreeze seems 
> to be an an alpha state at the moment--

For Mac or everything? certainly alpha for Mac.

> pyinstaller seems to be farther along, it can actually 
> produce Mac bundles, but it doesn't yet (AFAIK) produce universal 
> binaries.

I wonder why not -- it should use whatever python it's run with. Maybe 
I'll try to check it out -- though see above -- without the possibility 
of Ronald's help, I'm be afraid to even start!

> It also seems to have some weird bugs with window focus and 
> launching new instances of Python with a generic icon--at least, this 
> has been reported on their mailing list WRT wxPython apps. So it doesn't 
> seem ready for prime time yet either.

I wonder who's working on the Mac stuff -- I don't think I've seen 
anyone on this list talk about it -- are you here?

-Chris







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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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