Using eggs or py2exe to distribute apps

[Marcus]

Hi,

I'm to the stage where I need to deploy the app I built with wxPython.
I've been able to successfully build it w/py2exe into a binary (about
10MB size in total).

What I'd like to do is create an automatic updater, so that I can have
users download updated versions of my *application code* without having
to have them redownload everything (the interpreter, etc) via a complete
redownload (I want to package some things as "components").

Eggs seem like an ideal solution, but I haven't had any luck using them
in conjunction with py2exe.

It would seem that the most effective solution would be to package a
python interpreter (with wxPython, etc already included) into the
distributed app's directory and not use py2exe at all; however, since
everything would be included in the distribution, it would seem that the
full python distro would be huge (50MB at least), which defeats the
purpose of wanting to build the app into "components".

Worst-case scenario would be to have them redownload the 10MB update
each time, but that's less than ideal, since the audience for my program
would have more frequent/less substantial updates over time, rather than
big updates all at once.

Any guidance or suggestions are very much appreciated.

Marcus

 

[Matthias Vodel]

Hey,

Use pyInstaller

http://pyinstaller.hpcf.upr.edu/cgi-bin/trac.cgi

Easier to use in comparison to py2exe ... very good tool - try it!

Bye,

Matthias

 

[schmir]

Hi,

I'm to the stage where I need to deploy the app I built with wxPython.
I've been able to successfully build it w/py2exe into a binary (about
10MB size in total).

What I'd like to do is create an automatic updater, so that I can have
users download updated versions of my *application code* without having
to have them redownload everything (the interpreter, etc) via a complete
redownload (I want to package some things as "components").

Eggs seem like an ideal solution, but I haven't had any luck using them
in conjunction with py2exe.

It should be possible. exclude your application code from being
packaged, copy an egg file to your disribution directory and add it to
sys.path.

It would seem that the most effective solution would be to package a
python interpreter (with wxPython, etc already included) into the
distributed app's directory and not use py2exe at all; however, since
everything would be included in the distribution, it would seem that the
full python distro would be huge (50MB at least), which defeats the
purpose of wanting to build the app into "components".

Worst-case scenario would be to have them redownload the 10MB update
each time, but that's less than ideal, since the audience for my program
would have more frequent/less substantial updates over time, rather than
big updates all at once.

Any guidance or suggestions are very much appreciated.

You can try bbfreeze from http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/bbfreeze/
(of which I'm the author). It has support for egg files. If you
package your application code as an egg, it will by default copy your
whole egg (either as a directory or zipped) to the distribution
folder.