[Distutils] Need for some guidance

Phil Sayre & Jean Richon sayrich1 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 3 23:19:18 CEST 2010


Hello,
     My name is Phil Sayre.  My email is sayrich1 at gmail.com.  I have written
a Python program which I will be using in my capacity as treasurer for a
small, 200 member group of chamber music aficionados.  This program provides
an interactive interface to the person sitting in front of a laptop
computer, allowing him to look up a member's information, given the member's
name, and determine whether or not he has paid his dues for the current
year.  It allows for corrections to the data, e.g., address, email, phone.
When the member pays $10, I will be able to mark him paid on the current
date with a mouse click.  This program is easy to use and much faster and
simpler than using an Excel spreadsheet, which is the system I have had to
deal with for the past 2 years.

That is the justification for the program.  Now I am wondering if I might
not be able to offer this program to other similar organizations, for
possibly a modest price.  To do this I would have to know something about
packaging it as an installable product.  I think the proper place to look
for answers is the Distutils sig, isn't it?  But I confess at this
point, the documentation is just extremely confusing.

My program uses the CSV module to read and write 'comma separated
value' records from/to an Excel produced file, a package called EasyGui
which provides the user interface, and the modules shelve, sys, string,
cPickle, datetime.  Shelve is the method which affords the fast record
lookup in the data base.   The csv module is distributed with Python.

I am planning, for the time being, to offer this to only Windows users.

When I downloaded Python, I selected Pythonwin for my own laptop running
Windows XP.  I don't really know much about this package other than it runs
under Windows.

For my probable customers, I don't expect that any of them will have a
Python system installed.  And I don't need to provide them with a means of
editing and compiling Python programs--but I clearly will need to provide
the Python execution engine.  But perhaps this is not separable from the
compiler--I don't know.

Where do fit within the Distutil spectrum?  I think it's section 5, but I
can't get beyond the first paragraph.

I'd appreciate any help that is available.
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