[Python-ideas] Using Python for end user applications

[Paul Moore]

On 7 February 2017 at 12:33, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 28, 2017, at 11:26 AM, Paul Moore wrote:
>> I'm working on
>> a project to bundle a working zipapp with the embedded distribution to
>> make a standalone exe - would having something like that make any
>> difference in your environment?
>
> I'd be interested in this, and whether there's any potential for code
> sharing with Pynsist - which does something similar, but producing an
> installer rather than a standalone exe.

https://github.com/pfmoore/pylaunch

It's a very simple C stub that can be prepended to a zipapp, which
then runs it with an embedded distribution.

At the moment it's a bit stalled because the manifest hacking needed
for putting the embedded distribution in a subdirectory doesn't work
with Python 3.5, and there's a bug in 3.6 that breaks using Py_Main()
with a zipapp. But it works, all I really need to do is to write some
management code to automate the process of building the exe from a
script. (I don't want to require the Python distribution to be in the
same directory as the application, as then there would be a
"python.exe" in that directory, which messes up my use case of having
the apps on PATH).

The fact that it's likely to end up being 3.6.1+ only means I'm not
feeling in any particular rush to make progress. At the moment I'm
occasionally dabbling with it to see if I can find workarounds for the
issues with 3.6.0 and 3.5, but I'm not *really* interested in
maintaining significantly more complex C code just to deal with
backward compatible bug workarounds :-)

Paul