[Distutils] [Py2exe-users] Re: Getting tired with py2exe

[Bob Ippolito]

On Sep 20, 2005, at 5:44 PM, Steve Holden wrote:

> Thomas Heller wrote:
>
>> I'm slowly getting tired maintaining py2exe.  It is far from perfect,
>> although it has interesting features (I would say).
>> The problem, apart from the work, is that it is good enough for me  
>> - I
>> can do everything that I need with it.  But I assume I use far less
>> libaries than other Python programmers, so a lot of bugs will  
>> never bite
>> me.
>> It is also interesting that the recently introduced bundle-files  
>> option,
>> which allows to build single-file exes has gained a lot of interest -
>> although the ONLY use case (so far) I have myself for it is to  
>> implement
>> inproc COM servers which will compatible with Python clients (and  
>> other
>> Python inproc COM servers) because of the total isolation of the  
>> Python
>> VMs.
>> Is anyone interested in taking over the maintainance,  
>> documentation, and
>> further development?
>> Should py2exe be integrated into another, larger, package?  Pywin32
>> comes to mind, but also Philip Eby's setuptools (that's why I post to
>> distutils-sig as well)...
>>
> Ignoring all the philosophical questions I'd like to thank you for  
> all your hard work on py2exe over the years, which has benefited  
> the Windows Python community immeasurably.

I'd like to thank you as well.  Although I'm primarily a Mac OS X  
(and various other *nix-ish things) user myself, I have used py2exe  
on several occasions to package a commercial product and to give  
various one-off applications to clients.

py2exe was also a large inspiration for py2app (which I have been  
neglecting lately).  py2exe (and py2app) currently do everything I  
need them do (albeit with a little prodding), so that's why I've done  
so little with it in the past few months.

I hope that the packager-future will be largely setuptools based and  
that the various platform-specific packagers will share a lot more  
code in the future (setuptools, modulegraph, etc.), making  
maintenance easier and more fun for everyone.  This was my primary  
use case when I was initially discussing the egg spec with PJE back  
around pycon-time (though I have been unfortunately useless  
implementing and evolving it).

Right now, I think the packagers and the packages are at odds,  
because the packagers need metadata that the packages don't provide  
(in a pre-setuptools universe)... so right now users (or the  
packagers) need to know a lot of magic incantations to make the  
various complicated Python packages work, where with setuptools based  
packages the magic incantations are built-in :)

-bob