[Distutils] Re: Add multiple frozen modules

[Gordon McMillan]

(Doing my bi-monthly perusal of Distutils activity, I find...)

[Mark]
> ....  Specifically, Greg Stien and Gordon McMillan (and plenty of
> people before them :-) seem to have what is considered "state of the
> art" in where this is heading.

[Jim Ahlstrom]
I don't know of techniques which aren't Windows specific. 
Greg??Gordon??

Mark is referring to Greg's imputil.py
(http://www.lyra.org/greg/small/) and some of the places I've taken
it. My Win32-specific installer
(ftp://ftp.python.org/pub/python/contrib/System/Installer_r_01.exe)
makes use of this, but not all of it is Windows specific. (I
originally packaged it so the cross-platform stuff was available
separately, but there was no apparent interest from non-Windows
users.)

Greg's imputil.py basically makes it possible to create a chain of
importers, with the standard mechanism pushed to the end. Writing an
importer is easy. You set up the chain is site.py.

I created a way of building archives of .pyc's (or .pyo's, though
I've never worked with them). These are compressed with zlib. The
standard library fits in about 500K and (subjectively) it is no
slower and perhaps faster than the regular method. The mechanism
handles modules and packages, and the building of an archive can be
done in all kinds of ways (including using modulefinder from freeze).

I also created another kind of archive that can package up arbitrary
stuff, and is fairly easily unpacked from C code.

All of the above is cross-platform.

On Windows, this means you can have a complete Python installation
(independent of any other Python installation) in a single directory:

myPython/
 python.exe    (and/or pythonw.exe)
 python15.dll  (completely vanilla)
 py_lib.pyz
 exceptions.py (from the std distr)
 site.py       (hacked to load all the .pyz's)
 [any other .pyd's or .dll's you want]
 [more .pyz's if you want]
 [more .py's if you want]

(The Window's installation / standalone stuff goes further than this).

These .pyz's do work on Linux, but the steps Python goes through to
determine where it lives is simpler on Windows. I'm not sure what it
would take to get a single directory Python installation
(independent of any other installed Pythons) working on *nix.

- Gordon