[Python-Dev] Packaging and binary distributions for Python 3.3

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Thu Oct 13 21:42:13 CEST 2011


On 13 October 2011 20:28, Tim Golden <mail at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:
> On 13/10/2011 19:36, Paul Moore wrote:
>>
>> I don't really understand the benefits of bdist_msi over
>> bdist_wininst
>
> Just commenting on this particular issue: in essence, the .MSI
> format is the Microsoft standard, something which is especially
> important for corporate rollouts. We're not particularly bureaucratic,
> but I recently had to bundle a small number of common extensions as
> .msi packages so they could be deployed easily onto our baseline
> machines.
>
> I'm not saying that Python *must* have .msi support for this reason:
> if it didn't already, you could argue that it could be provided by
> corporates who needed this, or by 3rd party service providers, if
> only by providing light .msi wrappers round standard installers.

Thanks for the clarification. I can see why this would be important.
But maintaining 3 different interfaces to do essentially the same
thing (collect some data from the user, then based on that data put
the same set of files in the same places) seems a waste of effort, and
a recipe for discrepancies in capabilities.

Maybe the wininst and MSI installers should ultimately become simple
UIs around a zipfile and an invocation of the packaging APIs? Not that
I'm offering to do that work, I'm afraid...

Paul.


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