packaging and installing

[Brian Blais]

On Dec 13, 2010, at 12:30 PM, Godson Gera wrote:

> 
> 
> On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:46 PM, Brian Blais <bblais at bryant.edu> wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I was wondering if there is any standard or suggested way of installing packages *without* going to the commandline.  I often have students who, from there experience in Windows, have never looked at the commandline before and it is a bit of a challenge to get them to install something (i.e. go to the commandline, cd over to the proper folder, type python setup.py install, etc...).  I've never seen a package with something like a "compileme.bat", but was wondering if there is some suggested way of doing this or some reasons *not* to do this.  I can always write my own (1-line) .bat file, but I didn't want to reinvent the wheel.  Perhaps there is a better way for me to do this, ideally in a platform independent way.
>> 
> You don't even have to write a bat file. Python's distutils package allows you to build exe file which creates generic windows wizard window for installing packages. 
> 
> Take a look at distutils package http://docs.python.org/distutils/builtdist.html
> 

that's very interesting, and I didn't realize that.  it may be useful, and solves part of my problem, but the other part is that I am not on a windows machine and have to distribute to windows users.  Or perhaps I am on windows, and need to distribute to Mac.  It's great that python itself is so cross-platform, but the installation process for packages seems a lot less so. 


			thanks,

				bb


-- 
Brian Blais
bblais at bryant.edu
http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais
http://bblais.blogspot.com/