Hello, On 07/11/2015 11:20 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
Yeah, I'd distribute the .py files and have done with it. Maybe do it up as a package and distribute it via pip, which allows you to fetch dependencies automatically.
I'm also writing something, and the target audience is Windows users in a Treasury department, not really a command line crowd. The supposed ease of "just click on the
program icon" is all very well, but it means you have to have a whopping new download any time there's an update to your code (they have to redownload the entire binary even if you're using the same Python and the same libraries), and you have to distribute a whole bunch of different versions (32-bit vs 64-bit, possibly different builds for different Windowses, etc), and deal with the support issues from people who grabbed the wrong one.
Let the feature creep begin... : Why not put the updates as diffs/patches? In any given change, there's only a part of the .EXE that will change and I can't think of a good reason to download the whole thing again like Google Chrome. This either requires using some third party tool for the patch, or rolling one's own. Once Python itself has been
installed, users can still normally "just click on the program icon" even though it's a .py file - that's the whole point of file associations. And then their installed Python can be updated by the normal mechanisms, and your code will happily run on the new version. Suppose, for instance, that your program does something over HTTPS, and people are using it in a critical environment... and then someone discovers a flaw in OpenSSL, which has happened now and then. A bugfix release of CPython will fix that instantly for everyone who's using the standard python.org downloads; but if you've packaged up your own Python, it'll be frozen at whatever version you had when you built that - which might not even be the latest available at the time. How quickly will you get around to building new installers? Much better to distribute Python code without an interpreter, and let people get their own interpreters.
I just found this: https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/presentation/393/ It's a talk titled "Deep Freeze: building better stand-alone apps with Python". I'll watch it later.
ChrisA
-- ~Jugurtha Hadjar, -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
