[Python-Dev] PEP 441 - Improving Python ZIP Application Support

[Barry Warsaw]

On Feb 17, 2015, at 08:44 PM, Paul Moore wrote:

>I'd like to see a good single-file bundled application format for
>Python (on Windows, there's py2exe, which is fantastic, but often I
>simply don't *want* to bundle Python and the stdlib with my code).

I agree, for deployment to environments where you can guarantee that the basic
Python infrastructure is available.  It may not be though, and perhaps we can
relegate that to py2exe, cx_freeze, and friends, although I would say that
having such support built into Python would be very cool, and of high value to
our users.

That's not to play down the usefulness of good executable zip support, pared
of the stdlib and interpreter.  OTOH, it would be nice to think ahead, where
the same tool could generate both types of single-file executables.

>Handling of C extensions in zipfiles isn't so much an executable zip
>issue as a zipimport one.

Agreed.

>(Although promoting the executable zip format would help persuade projects to
>*use* those features rather than assuming a filesystem). Donald Stufft has a
>proposal on resource APIs for importlib that would help with this.

Yep, which I support. :)  pkg_resources.resource_filename() is the way to do
that today and it abstracts away all the nastiness.

Mostly agree with your other comments, though I haven't played with pyzzer and
pex is quite nice, for the pared down use case, although it's not quite
integrated with virtualenv (I've had some discussions with pex's author about
that).

OTOH, I think it *would* be useful to have this built into Python.  We almost
have too many choices, and may people I've talked to lately (including
experienced Pythonistas) have trouble choosing the right tool.  But that can
come later; let's get some basic support into Python first, and a good start
IMHO is executable zips (including support for extension modules) with the
pkg_resources/importlib API additions.

Cheers,
-Barry
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