On 5/2/2018 12:42 PM, Gregory Szorc wrote:
I know this kinda/sorta exists with zipimporter. But zipimporter uses zlib (slow) and only allows .py/.pyc files. And I think some Python application distribution tools have also solved this problem. I'd *really* like to see a proper/robust solution in Python itself. Along that vein, it would be really nice if the "standalone Python application" story were a bit more formalized. From my perspective, it is insanely difficult to package and distribute an application that happens to use Python. It requires vastly different solutions for different platforms. I want to declare a minimal boilerplate somewhere (perhaps in setup.py) and run a command that produces an as-self-contained-as-possible application complete with platform-native installers.
I few years ago I helped my wife create a tutorial in the Renpy visual storytelling engine. It is free and open source. https://www.renpy.org It is written in Python, while users write scripts in both Python and a custom scripting language. When we were done, we pressed a button and it generated self-contained zip files for Windows, Linux, and Mac. This can be done from any of the three platforms. After we tested all three files, she created a web page with links to the three files for download. There have been no complaints so far. Perhaps the file generators could be adapted to packaging a project directory into a self-contained app. -- Terry Jan Reedy