The ultimate irony Trouble installing Installer.

[Chris Lyon]

I'm trying to construct a mechanism to install a small set of scripts
to either windows or Linux to machines that might not have python(
obviously mostly Windows).

Having trawled around it seems the generally considered approach is
the McMillan Installer suite.

So I start to follow the instructions in Getting Started.

quoting :-On non-Windows platforms, the first thing to do is build the
runtime executables. Windows users can skip this step, because all of
Python is contained in pythonXX.dll, and Installer will use your
pythonXX.dll.

It appears the first instruction for those running on Windows is II)

so I download extract to a directory

cd to that directory run c:\python22\python Configure.py


and get:-

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "Configure.py", line 13, in ?
    import mf, bindepend
  File "mf.py", line 234, in ?
    import hooks
ImportError: No module named hooks

Now it is EXCEPTIONALLY depressing when you can't even install an
Installer...

Is this another conceptual error that the 'average' python user does
15 times before breakfast, or am I mis-reading things and this is a
Linux only step.

Secondly Has anyone got a step by step guide somewhere to how exactly
to distribure little_app.py this way? I'm sure Installer is an
excelent tool but the manuals contain no obvious example? Do I
construct a spec file? does makeCOMServer do everything for me? Is the
COMServer the entire windows component that I need or is this just a
specific subset of operations?

I sort of hope that at the end of this I can end up with an exe I can
load up up on Windows machine, ( and some equivalent in the Linux
world I assume an rpm or similar) and click the exe sit back and watch
it build icon's and menu items? Is this laughingly optimistic and I
should go away and learn to use the windows interface properly before
even claimimng any degree of python proficientcy or is this actually a
perfectly exceptable thing to do?

Sorry that this all sounds so damn misserable but I've been kicking
this all around for a year now and I'm staggered by how difficult
python installation on  machines all seems. For instance I would point
at the level of conprehension requied to add flat files into a
Distutils Setup.py script just to get idle to install a few icons.

Is the python way do not use a tool unless you've read understood and
personalized the source completely?


Sulk, sulk, moan, moan, blooming computers, I'm going off to grow
mushrooms...