[Python-Dev] bdist_wininst

[Thomas Heller]

bdist_wininst has seen a lot of bug fixes and improvements, mostly by
Mark, partly by me.

I'd like to 'improve' the visual appearance, too.

First, I would like to add an XP style manifest as resource in the exe,
which displays the gui elements in the XP style when running under XP.
I don't think this will create problems on older windows versions, but
if anyone knows better please speak up.

Second, the default bitmap it displays is the old Python Powered logo by
Just (that with the cool license ;-).  A much better bitmap would be
that from <http://tinyurl.com/595xd>, which seems to have been made for
the PSF.  There are two problems with this image: The size is 122x261
pixels, while bdist_wininst would prefer 152x261 pixels.  Maybe someone
can recreate the icon with a changed size?
The file size, when it is converted to 24-bit color bmp, is
nearly 100 kB, which is a bit large imo for an optical gimmik - but this
can probably be fixed by compressing the image in the installer itself.
Finally, I'm not sure I'm allowed to use and redistribute this image.

Third, the installer executable doesn't have an icon.  Personally I
don't care too much about that, but Phil Hornby made two icons which he
posted to the distutils list (the gmane archives do a nice job to show
the icons on the web page):

<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.distutils.devel/852>
<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.distutils.devel/855>

Note that with standard Python it is not possible to change the default
icon to something else, although it could be done with pywin32, or with
some tools included in py2exe.  So, distutils bdist_wininst probably can
not provide an option to change the icon to something else.
Also I know that some people build bdist_wininst installers on Linux,
which is possible for pure python package distributions, but it wouldn't
be possible to change the icon there anyway.  So, the question is: is
this icon good enough to have it in basically every distutils' created
windows installer?

Thomas