[Python-Dev] New Windows installer for Python 3.5

[David Anthoff]

> Nothing is merged in yet and everything can still change, so I'm keen to
hear whatever
> feedback people have. I've tried to make improvements fairly for
first-time users
> through to sysadmins, but if I've missed something big I'd like to hear
about it before
> we get too close to alpha 1.

It would be great if the new installer supported silent, portable installs.
What I have in mind is a silent installation that drops all the necessary
files for a working python into a folder, but does not put ANY file anywhere
else and does not register anything anywhere on the system. So no PATH
modification, no registering of this install as one of the available python
interpreters, no uninstall entry or anything like that. By "all the
necessary files" I mean that it drops things like the MSVC runtime dlls etc
into that folder into which I'm installing python, but again doesn't try to
install things like that system or even user wide.

I'll give you my very specific use-case, but I think this might be useful
for others as well: we are trying to build an installer for some other
product X that internally requires a python instance to work. This python
instance should NOT be visible to anything other than product X, i.e. no
user should ever start it directly or anything like that, it really is an
implementation detail of product X. If we had an official python installer
that supported silent, portable installs, I could just call that python
installer inside the setup program for X, and it would drop a fully working
python installation into a sub-directory of the install directory of product
X. And we would be happy :)

The old MSI installer sort of had something like that with the MSI
administrative install option. But it never really worked because the
administrative install didn't drop the MSVC runtime dlls anywhere, as far as
I could tell. At some point I hacked around that by modifying the MSI file
in my setup program to also drop the MSVC runtime dlls, but that was VERY
hacky... 

Thanks,
David