As far as the possibility of distributing Python as a merge module? I'd recommend against it. Shared location merge modules are a maintenance nightmare, and private location merge modules may not offer the benefit you need. Better to just install the main Python msi as part of a suite with your installer, whether you build that installer in WiX and burn, or not.
I'm not familiar w/ shared location merge modules vs. private location merge modules. Are you referring to the possibility of having multiple python apps trying to use their own python versions? How relocatable is python?
Fairly relocatable. If there is was a merge module, I'd really prefer it to be shared. The challenge here is site-packages: different users of the merge module would need different copies of site-packages (or else installing additional packages might break existing software). Another challenge with shared location merge modules is upgrades: the Python installer currently doesn't use stable component IDs; I think this would cause problems for users of the merge module. Providing stable component IDs is a challenge since it's difficult to version the files on disk. Not sure why Michael thinks that a private location merge module would provide no benefits to the user of the merge module.
The maintenance nightmare isn't on your end (in my case), it would be on me to provide patches/upgrades. I do agree that patches w/ merge modules are a pain/nightmare. But what about providing both a merge module and msi so developers have a choice?
I certainly wouldn't stop providing an MSI. The next question would be whether the MSI then also installs into the shared location, or whether it would have a private copy of Python.
I work on open source projects myself, and we always provide both a merge module and a normal msi installer. It's very little extra work (in WiX at least) to create both.
But what's the quality of these? Ideally, I'd like to create a single merge module which, at the option of the user of the merge module, produces either a shared or a private installation. Is that still only little extra work in Wix?
At any rate, where could I find the script used to generate the msi package? Perhaps I can translate it into WiX if I thought it'd be used (but why bother if no one's interested?).
It's in Tools/msi/msi.py. Regards, Martin