On 21-sep-2005, at 2:59, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
<trimming a few lists from my reply>
That leaves OS X, where I gather that convention and policy dictates that applications just be runnable without an install step. There you can bundle all your eggs, and rely on the system Python, as long as it's recent enough. Ideally, then, you need a wrapper for the "easy_install -ad" directory that makes one or more real OS X apps, in the way that setuptools makes .exe wrappers now. (Only more complex, since all it really does right now is copy and rename a standard launcher .exe file.)
Relying on the system python might not be a smart thing to do. Apple is taking backward compatibility seriously, but not always for the unix-y bits. That may or may not include Python. It would be rather annoying if an application did depent on the system python and Apple decided to ship another release of python.
So, it seems to me that if you can rely on Python and the stdlib, the scope of what a py2exe or py2app tool has to do in the setuptools context is at least somewhat reduced. However, there's definitely a need for other developers to be involved, because with my current amount of spare time, it'll be a year or two before I could even think about doing anything py2app-ish. (I don't even have a Mac yet, for example.)
Building something py2app-ish is easy enough: take py2app and hack it until it fits into your scheme. I've done this at work to build standone unix daemons and that wasn't very hard. Ronald