[Distutils] Self-contained boostrap scripts [was: Re: A new, experimental packaging tool: distil]

[Philippe Ombredanne]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 26 March 2013 09:49, Philippe Ombredanne <pombredanne at nexb.com> wrote:
>> Would anyone know of a better way to package things in a single
>> python-executable bootstrapping script file without obfuscating the
>> source contents in compressed/encoded/obfuscated byte arrays?
>
> Packaging as a zip file is a good way - but on Windows the file needs
> to be named xxx.py (which is surprising, to say the least :-)) for the
> relevant file association to be triggered (and on Unix, a #! line
> needs to be prepended).
Paul:
I was not talking about this type of zips, but rather the same used in
virtualenv, i.e. a string in a .py file that contains an encoded zip.
That string is then decoded and unzipped at runtime as in here:
https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/blob/develop/virtualenv.py#L1933

This is not a zip, not an egg, not a wheel but some egg-in-py,
zip-in-py or wheel-in-py and is similar to a shar shell archive.

My point was that on the one hand, I like the fact that everything is
self contained in one single .py file that you can execute right away.
On the other hand, I find it somewhat discomforting as an emerging
best way to package and distribute self-contained bootstrap scripts.
Yet I cannot think of a better way atm: for instance splitting things
in non-encoded non-binary plain strings would be quite weird too.

Virtualenv does it, distil is doing it now, pip tried some of it here
https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/develop/contrib/get-pip.py
In contrast, buildout, distribute and setuptools bootstrap scripts do
not embed their dependencies and either try to get them satisfied
locally or attempt to download the requirements.
Having some support to do self-contained  bootstrap scripts (as in
requiring no network access and embedding all their dependencies)
using this shar style could be something to consider normalizing?

-- 
Philippe Ombredanne

+1 650 799 0949 | pombredanne at nexB.com
DejaCode Enterprise at http://www.dejacode.com
nexB Inc. at http://www.nexb.com