I've been through this kind of thing a few times in the past and received excellent advice here on clpy about how to deal with specific technical aspects (e.g. how to use setuptools, InnoSetup, etc).
I'm now wondering where this type of thing is best addressed in more general terms. What I usually see happening, in projects I've worked on and in others, is that developers get the code working on their own computers, using source control tools and (if we're lucky) tests developed in parallel with the code, but without much attention to final packaging until the very end when the code is about to be shipped. Is this appropriate? Inappropriate? Do your projects start using serious packaging and distribution tools very early in development, before the code is anywhere near usable? Should they? I'm involved in something that I wish was that way, mainly because I really don't have any way to put a complete installation on my own computers; I have to develop my subsystem more or less independently of the overall app, then toss stuff over the wall to the more central application guys for integration, which gets slow sometimes because we're distributed all over. This is a fairly complex server app that depends on a lot of external packages and programs running across multiple machines, so I could see the packaging problem being messy. It would cause a significant interruption in development to try to package things so that the non-central developers could install and hack it without a lot of assistance. But I think it would be worthwhile given how much easier it would become to test changes. We do plan to bundle up and release the code sometime (maybe as a Debian package) but for now that's deferred until the code is more complete and stable. I'm wondering how other projects go about this. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
