[Python-ideas] Distribution agnostic Python project packaging

[James Pic]

Hi all !

Ive heard some people saying it was rude to post on a mailing list without
introducing yourself so here goes something: my name is James Pic and I've
been developing and deploying a wide variety fof Python projects Python for
the last 8 years, I love to learn and share and writing documentation
amongst other things such as selling liquor.

The way I've been deploying Python projects so far is probably similar to
what a lot of people do and it almost always includes building runtime
dependencies on the production server. So, nobody is going to congratulate
me for that for sure but I think a lot of us have been doing so.

Now I'm fully aware of distribution specific packaging solutions like
dh-virtualenv shared by Spotify but here's my mental problem: I love to
learn and to hack. I'm always trying now distributions and I rarely run the
one that's in production in my company and when I'm deploying personal
projects I like funny distributions like arch, Alpine Linux,  or
interesting paas solutions such as cloudfoundry, openshift, rancher and
many others.

And I'm always facing the same problem: I have to either build runtime
dependencies on the server, either package my thing in the platform
specific way. I feel like I've spent a really huge amount of time doing
this king of thing. But the java people, they have jars, and they have
smooth deployments no matter where they deploy it.

So that's the idea I'm trying to share: I'd like to b able to build a file
with my dependencies and my project in it. I'm not sure packaging only
Python bytecode would work here because of c modules. Also, I'm always
developing against a different Python version because I'm using different
distributions because it's part of my passions in life, as ridiculous as it
could sound to most people, I'm expecting at least some understanding from
this list :)

So I wonder, do you think the best solution for me would be to build an elf
binary with my Python and dependencies that I could just run on any
distribution given its on the right architecture ? Note that I like to use
Arm too, so I know I'd need to be able to cross compile too.

Thanks a lot for reading and if you can to take some time to share your
thoughts and even better : point me in a direction, if that idea is the
right solution and I'm going to be the only one interested I don't care if
it's going to take years for me to achieve this.

Thanks a heap !

Beat regards

PS: I'm currently at the openstack summit in Barcelona if anybody there
would like to talk about it in person, in which case I'll buy you the
drinks ;)
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