[Tutor] when is "pythondontwritebytecode" useful?

[eryksun]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 2:44 PM, Albert-Jan Roskam <fomcl at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hmmm, number of OS * number of Python versions = a lot of packages. Isn't
> a .zip file easiest? Or maybe msi or wininst*) on Windows and .deb on
> Linux (with alien that can easily be converted to e.g. rpm).

The egg format is old and tired. bdist_wheel is new and improved:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/#comparison-to-egg

wininst lets the user uninstall through the control panel, and
easy_install can use it in a virtual environment. But as a
distribution format it requires separate 32-bit and 64-bit installers
even for pure-Python libraries. Also, pip works with wheel and not
wininst.

On Linux I wouldn't bother making a deb/rpm package -- not unless
you're the package maintainer for the distro. Most people will either
use a stable package from the repo or install a development package in
a virtual environment.

> Last time I tried creating a wininst under Linux it created an .exe
> file of correct/plausible size, but with a huge traceback. Never
> bothered to try if it did work. Maybe it was this:
> http://bugs.python.org/issue8954.

That issue shows a warning, not a traceback. The exe should be OK, but
rename it to use the correct platform name, either win32 or win-amd64
depending on which wininst exe was used.