[Pythonmac-SIG] Bundlebuilder--why remove it?

[Kevin Walzer]

On 12/9/09 12:32 PM, Christopher Barker wrote:
> Kevin Walzer wrote:
>> Bundlbuilder doesn't really argvemulation anyway, since hooks for this
>> exist in all the major GUI libraries (Tk, wxPython, and certainly
>> PyObjC).
>
> I actually use argv emulation more for non-gui apps -- a way for folks
> that don't like the command line to do some simple processing with
> drag-and-drop.
>
> However, presumably py2app has the same issue, and if not, whatever
> py2app does could be ported over.

Hmm, OK, not sure how py2app does this.
>
> Form my point of view I want something that works and will be supported.
> With Bob I. no longer active in the PythonMac community, py2app has been
> languishing, though Jack Jansen isn't around either, so so has
> BundleBuilder. Ronald has done a great job of fixing the really critical
> bugs -- but he's doing so much else.

Agreed. No criticism of Ronald; he is extremely busy and I am grateful 
for all he does.
>
> So it comes down to: is anyone intending to support either one, and if
> so -- that person gets to choose which! If it were me, I'd choose one
> based on what code base is the most robust and maintianble, rather than
> what happens to work now.

As I said, I've done some hacking on bundlebuilder, simply because I can 
more or less grok what's going on with it.

>
> What I'd really like to see is a "grand unification" of executable
> builders: while the actual executable building is platform dependent,
> detection of what modules need to be included, etc, is not, and neither
> is the API for specifying what you need.
>
> There has been some progress in that vein: bbfreeze uses modulgraph from
> the py2aap project. It also support Windows and Linux, and Mac a little
> bit -- the author recently requested that someone take on the Mac
> version -- it's not really his thing, but I don't think any one has.
>
> PyInstaller has a Mac version in SVN that I haven't tried yet.
>
> Are there others?

Not that I know of. Pyinstaller looks interesting, but it's not there yet.

>
> Maybe putting over efforts behind one of these projects would be more
> fruitful -- we' only need to maintain the mac-specific parts.

Perhaps, but I'm not the person to do that...my time, like everyone 
else's, is also limited.

>
>> And while bundlebuilder is a less robust tool than py2app,
>
> In what way? I never quite understood its limitations.

It doesn't seem to be quite as good at finding all the modules to 
include. I've found that I have had to manually specify some packages to 
bundle. Its debugging messages even say that it may not find everything, 
and that it may be a "false alarm."

py2app, also, is a more general packaging tool--you can create pkg 
installers with it, and you can't with bundlebuilder.
>
>> What's the best way to keep bundlebuilder available for Python 3.x?
>> Submit a feature request at the bug tracker? Or separate it out, and
>> submit a PyPi project?
>
> Are you proposing to be the maintainer? I'd say submit patches, and see
> if they are accepted -- if not, then fork it and make a new project.

I might just fork bundlebuilder, once I move to Python 3.x, which won't 
be for some time. I need to make sure all the libraries I use or am 
planning to use are supported. In the shorter term, I'm going to move my 
app packaging to bundlebuilder, if for no other reason than it works for 
me now. The current issues with py2app and 64-bit support would be 
showstoppers for me, Ronald's time is too scarce for him to look at this 
right now, and I don't know enough to offer a fix. So I have to go with 
the solution that works.

--Kevin

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