Distributing programs depending on third party modules.

[Kevin Walzer]

Tina I wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> Is there a preferred way to distribute programs that depends on third 
> party modules like PyQt, Beautifulsoup etc? I have used setuptools and 
> just having the setup script check for the existence of the required 
> modules. If they're not found I have it exit with a message that it need 
> this or that installed.
> 
> But this is not very convenient for the end user and I have got a few 
> complaints about it. Am I missing something in setuptools or is there a 
> better way to do it (except for bundling the modules in the package 
> which seem like a rather nasty workaround)?
> 
> Thanks
> Tina

What platform are you doing this on? On the Linux platform, "dependency 
hell" of this sort is pretty much unavoidable, because there are so many 
different packaging systems (apt, rpm, and so on): it's standard to let 
the package manager handle these dependencies. And yes, it is 
frustrating for end users.

On Windows and the Mac, bundling all the modules isn't a "nasty 
workaround"; it's the standard behavior. End users on those platforms 
expect complete application packages, including all supporting 
libraries, to be provided by the developers. The standard tools for 
doing this are py2exe for Windows (http://www.py2exe.org/) and py2app 
for Mac (http://svn.pythonmac.org/py2app/py2app/trunk/doc/index.html).

There are other methods for distributing "frozen binaries," including 
the freeze module that ships with Python itself, cx_freeze, and 
PyInstaller: these three may work on Linux/Unix as well as Windows (they 
are not supported on the Mac). But the methods above are generally the 
ones most widely used.

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com