On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 01:06:11AM -0800, Brendan Barnwell wrote:
So are you suggesting that every single app should always be distributed as source code, run by a separate interpreter that users install separately?
My system has approximately sixty gajillion[1] apps installed that all rely on the same three or four runtime interpreters, mostly Perl, Python, and bash. I don't have sixty gajillion copies of those interpreters.
At no point has Chris suggested that static bundling of stand-alone applications should be prohibited, or that every script should be distributed with its own copy of its runtime environment.
The first is an extreme position that Chris never took, and the second is just silly, and would go against Chris' argument. I hate it when people misuse the term "straw man" on the internet, which they often do, but I think in this case the term is apt.
Chris' actual position is much less extreme, and more reasonable, than the exaggerated version you make.
The bottom line here is not whether or not there are use-cases for bundled stand-alone applications. We might disagree about what those use-cases are and how common they are, but they certainly exist.
The question here is whether those use-cases would justify including a project of the complexity of PyInstaller, cx_Freeze, py2exe, etc.
[1] A number somewhere between 100 and 100,000 *wink*