On Thursday, December 5, 2013 3:09:32 PM UTC+1, Roy Smith wrote: > > 1. Is it considered a bad idea in the Python community to ship one large > > Zip file with all dependencies? > Yes.
I see. Unfortunately, the library's users may be non-technical and might not even have experience with Python. The easier the installation process, therefore, the better. > > How do *you* prefer to obtain and install Python libraries? > "pip install" Thanks for this input. > > 2. Is it possible to distribute the library in a form that allows for an > > offline installation without administrator privileges using other tools, > > such as setuptools? > > You can use "pip --find-links" to point pip at a local repository of > packages. That solves the offline part. And the "without admin privs" > part is solved by setting up a virtualenv. Both "pip --find-links" and "virtualenv" sound technically feasible but may be too difficult for my users (especially virtualenv). > > A hard requirement is that I can only ship binary distributions of my > > library, as this is a proprietary product. I looked at Distutils and > > Setuptools, where the recommended approach seems to be to simply ship all > > sources. > Keep in mind that shipping just the pyc files offers very weak > protection against people examining your code. Google for "python > decompile" and you'll find a number of projects. I'm looking at the > docs for uncompyle now, which says: > > 'uncompyle' converts Python byte-code back into equivalent Python > > source. It accepts byte-code from Python version 2.7 only. Very interesting point. Thank you very much for pointing out uncompyle. I had always known that it was easy to decompile .pyc files, but hadn't imagined it to be that easy. I just tried uncompyle with some of our proprietary .pyc files. It took 5 minutes to set up and the results are near-perfect. Scary... :-S We might have to look into tools such as http://www.bitboost.com/#Python_obfuscator to obfuscate our code. Thanks for the valuable insights! Michael -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
