On 11/06/2010 6:43 PM, anatoly techtonik wrote:
On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Mark Hammond<[email protected]> wrote:
build_wininst code [1] function get_exe_bytes() used to fetch
appropriate stub, doesn't seem to be cross-platform.
Sorry, I must have misunderstood the original question - I was assuming
the question was regarding using Windows to generate Windows installers,
but for versions of Python other than the version being used to create
the installer.
More than that -
generated installer depends on specific version of MSVC compiler that
was used to compile Python. So it seems that there is no compatibility
even between one Python version.
That is correct - you can't generate a single exe that works on all
Python versions. However, you can use an arbitrary version of Python to
create an installer for a different arbitrary version of Python. This
is what pywin32 does - it uses Python 2.6/2.7 to create installers for
Python 2.3 -> 2.7 - this results in multiple installers, but they are
all created using a single python version.
The thorn in all this is related to the build process of the extensions
- even though Python 2.6 can be used to create all the *installers*,
they can't be used to build the individual components inside the
installer. ie, the process pywin32 uses for, eg, Python 2.3 is:
% python-2.3 setup.py build
% python-2.6 setup,py bdist_wininst --target-version=2.3
and the only reason this is done is that the bdist_wininst command in
Python 2.6 has enhancements which aren't in 2.3, and the technique above
allows me to take advantage of those features in those older versions.
In addition bdist_wininst generates spurious warning about missing
"necessary compiler setting" when run on Linux with an instruction to
make sure win32* modules are installed (which are of course not). Even
if wininst is strictly windows bdist, the generated .exe contains
'linux' suffix. Given all the above it doesn't really seem that
generated installer should work on windows at all. Not even speaking
about compatibilities between Python versions or OS versions. Clearly
that folks generating installers on Linux doesn't have any way to
check this compatibility, so they use an older version that has all
sorts of problems with Windows UAC [3].
Right - but I think this problem can be considered a bug in distutils
rather than an inherent limitation - but in practice you are correct
that the inability to build the C components used in the installer means
that in practice this really isn't cross-platform.
Mark
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