On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 09:08 -0500, Mark Hammond wrote:
It is quite easy to use the bdist_wininst command to create a Windows installer executable. A browser click on a link to the .EXE file allows for software installation, but easy_install is not run and the packages listed in setup.install_requires are not installed. Is there a way to force the windows installer to run easy_install?
If I were to create an egg, is there a content-type heading that would cause easy_install to process the egg? (much like application/vnd.ms-excel) I could not find an easy_install entry in the registry in my test WinXP computer after installing setuptools.
I thought one of these approaches would be fairly easy, but googling and experimenting have gotten me nowhere.
bdist_wininst is designed to install a python package, not to install a python "application" which has external dependencies. You may like to consider py2exe, which is designed to create a stand-alone executable from your python app - but even then, eggs etc are not processed - you are expected to have all relevant packages installed on your dev box, and they are packaged inside the app.
Thanks for the reply. I have deadlines to meet, so I guess I'll be taking the py2exe approach for now. However, I'm still interested in setting up the associations so that an HTTP content-type header for .egg files could be associated with easy_install. I assume if it were trivial it would have been done by now. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2006-September/006734.html has some thoughts from Phillip Eby about automatic execution of easy_install. I will tackle getting my Linux computers to handle an egg/easy_install content-type and then figure out the patches for setuptools so that this can be automatic. Hopefully the Windows situation will be reasonably parallel to Linux. Suggestions and advice are welcome. -- Lloyd Kvam Venix Corp