[Distutils] Self-contained boostrap scripts [was: Re: A new, experimental packaging tool: distil]
Paul Moore
p.f.moore at gmail.com
Thu Mar 28 13:32:39 CET 2013
On 28 March 2013 11:40, Philippe Ombredanne <pombredanne at nexb.com> wrote:
> 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.
Yes, my point was that Vinay's usage could be covered by distributing
distil as a zip file. All it is doing is decoding it's blob of data
(which is an encoded zip file) and then adding the resulting zip to
sys.path.
The virtualenv situation is different, as there we are trying to
ensure that we remain single-file while embedding things that are
*not* modules to add to sys.path. And we don't want to download our
dependencies because we need to be able to run with no internet
connection. But you are right, the embedded script approach is not
ideal.
I hope that "embedded binary blobs" does not become a common approach.
I'd much rather that "runnable zip files" became the norm. It's
certainly possible now, but I don't think it's well enough known (and
there are administrative issues like the file extension question on
Windows that make it more awkward than it should be). Hence my
comments, trying to raise awareness a bit.
Thanks for the feedback, and in particular the reminder that
virtualenv could do with looking at this... I've added a virtualenv
issue to remind me to think some more about it.
Paul
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