>> As far as the possibility of distributing Python as a merge >> module? I'd recommend against it. Shared location merge modules are >> a maintenance nightmare, and private location merge modules may >> not offer the benefit you need. Better to just install the main >> Python msi as part of a suite with your installer, whether you >> build that installer in WiX and burn, or not. > > I'm not familiar w/ shared location merge modules vs. private > location merge modules. Are you referring to the possibility of > having multiple python apps trying to use their own python versions? > How relocatable is python?
Fairly relocatable. If there is was a merge module, I'd really prefer it to be shared. The challenge here is site-packages: different users of the merge module would need different copies of site-packages (or else installing additional packages might break existing software). Another challenge with shared location merge modules is upgrades: the Python installer currently doesn't use stable component IDs; I think this would cause problems for users of the merge module. Providing stable component IDs is a challenge since it's difficult to version the files on disk. Not sure why Michael thinks that a private location merge module would provide no benefits to the user of the merge module. > The maintenance nightmare isn't on your > end (in my case), it would be on me to provide patches/upgrades. I do > agree that patches w/ merge modules are a pain/nightmare. But what > about providing both a merge module and msi so developers have a > choice? I certainly wouldn't stop providing an MSI. The next question would be whether the MSI then also installs into the shared location, or whether it would have a private copy of Python. > I work on open source projects myself, and we always provide > both a merge module and a normal msi installer. It's very little > extra work (in WiX at least) to create both. But what's the quality of these? Ideally, I'd like to create a single merge module which, at the option of the user of the merge module, produces either a shared or a private installation. Is that still only little extra work in Wix? > At any rate, where could I find the script used to generate the msi > package? Perhaps I can translate it into WiX if I thought it'd be > used (but why bother if no one's interested?). It's in Tools/msi/msi.py. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
