[Tutor] Re: Installation Routines (Joseph Quigley)

[Andrei]

Joseph Quigley <cpu.crazy <at> gmail.com> writes:

> I have a friend who recently got a hush-hush contract. He told me that it 
> was for writing an installation program for Windows and that he considered 
> python and Tkinter as an option.
> I know there are installers written in python for Linux. I suppose they are 
> easier to write, than one for Windows?

Python isn't really suitable for installing applications because it requires
itself a quite large installation beforehand (unless you freeze it, in which
case you still end up with quite a large overhead; might be a problem for
internet-based distributions). However, if the installation is purely for
computers which already have Python installed and it's not as much about
installing (IOW, registry modifications, making shortcuts, etc.) as it is about
distributing files, then yes, it's a reasonable option. Otherwise I agree with
the other replies: it's better to go for NSIS, InnoSetup or even a
self-extracting executable as produced by just about any zip tool out there -
you get an environment specifically made for this purpose, with nice GUI/wizard
to produce the code and low overhead.

> Now, I'm still new, and can't do GUI yet, but I was wondering.... how hard 
> would it be to write a simple installer for windows? None of that fancy INI 
> and registry crapp, just a very simple file copier to, oh lets say, My 
> Documents?

That would be very easy. Using easygui.py (a Tkinter wrapper) it would be even
absolutely trivial (show a standard directory selection dialog, then copy the
stuff - 5 lines of code or so). It would be cross-platform too.

Yours,

Andrei