As what must be penance for something or other, I'm needing to release a Python app for use under Windows XP. Please be gentle with me since I'm a Un*x weenie and the only thing I've had much practice with under Windows is rebooting it.
My app contains three different programs (say alice.py, bob.py, and carol.py) that need to be independently launchable, and a dozen or so other .py files that get imported into those first three. What I'd really really like is to make a single installer called (say) "app.exe". Launching app.exe should completely install Python, unpack all the necessary modules, and make three icons (alice, bob, carol) on the desktop. I know there's various ways of building Windows distros like that, but am not sure what's currently preferred. Gordon McMillan's site www.mcmillan-inc.com has had its domain expire (he really should renew it before some squatter grabs it!) and the mirror that I've found indicates that it was last updated for Python 2.3. I wrote my app under 2.4 and while I don't think I depend heavily on any 2.4 features, I'd rather not have to downgrade just to make this exe installer. There's also py2exe--is that as good? Also, what's the preferred way of releasing updates? That is, let's say I want to update my .py files and release a new version fairly frequently--should I just make a new .exe every time? Would launching the new one cleanly overwrite or uninstall the old one? Total coolness would be a way to ship an "update.py" along with the app, that syncs the app up to a Subversion repository, but that may be asking a bit much. I do have Visual C++ installed on the development machine, if that helps. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
