On Fri, 20 Nov 2020 at 13:47, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
I've seen this sort of thing in other app bundlers too, e.g. last time I looked py2app and py2exe had a bunch of special casing for various libraries.
This is quite a big problem, IMO. It makes these tools very flakey.
What is it about app bundling in Python that makes these things necessary? Something seems very wrong somewhere.
To be honest, I think it's more a case of a "clever idea" that everyone picked up on without really thinking about. For my own purposes, what I *actually* want is to specify a list of 3rd party packages (in pip terms, a "requirements file") and then have the installer bundle those, plus their dependencies, plus the stdlib. I *don't* want clever logic to decide how to strip out "unused" bits. I'm more than happy to trade application size for reliability. But for some unknown reason, no installer tool even offers this more of operation as an option. I think we'd be in a much better place (not great, but better) if application packaging tools worked on a principle of "tell me what you want, and I'll bundle it" rather than trying to infer the answer by inspecting code. Paul