wiki:PackagingTools

Our primary concern at this stage is deployment for Windows users.

There's two things we have to do:

  1. Package a standalone Python program which can be run without requiring third party libraries to be installed
  2. Guide the user through Installation on their machine.

Packaging

  • Py2Exe - proven tool for packaging a standalone Python program for Windows
  • python win-setup.py py2exe
  • Py2App - tool for packaging a standalone Python program for Mac OSX
  • cx_Freeze - an alternative which might be worth looking at

Building

  • A-A-P is a Python-based tool for downloading, building, and installing software written by Bram Moolenaar. It uses a collection of recipes, which can specify dependencies and build commands.
  • SCons is also Python-based and came out of the Software Carpentry competition a few years ago. It also aims to be a cross-platform super make.
  • sugar-jhbuild is a single custom Python script you download and it is smart enough to download/build all of the other software you need to build the Sugar Python environment for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). We could make a similar custom, cross-platform script for eXe.

Installation