[Py2exe-users] Re: single file executables with py2exe

[Chris L. <cli...@gm...>]

Brian Dorsey wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 20:18:48 +0200, Thomas Heller <th...@py...> wrote:
> 
>>So far, here are the ideas.
>>
>>First, prebuilt exe stubs can be provided by the py2exe installer,
>>which would contain most of the standard extensions distributed by the
>>python.org installer (plus _ctypes, of course ;-).  But this wouldn't
>>allow using the pywin32 extensions, for example - unless some kind soul
>>builds all of them into the exe stubs as well.
> 
> Sounds good for the most common cases.
> 
> 
>>Second, the exe stubs could be built (if a C compiler is installed) at
>>runtime when py2exe runs.  py2exe would collect the extension modules
>>needed, build a config.c file at runtime, and compiles this, linking to
>>static libraries of pywin32, wxPython, or whatever.
> 
> I'm not much of a C guy... but if the setup instructions were clear,
> I'd probably make an attempt to get this going. On the other hand...
> if this system existed, could someone who did have a compiler all
> setup properly build them and make them available to me using the
> first option?

using a C compiler with distutils is realy easy.

getting hands on a free C compiler isn't that complicated neither. tough 
i dont have seen a all in once installer.

there are two impls of GCC:

- http://mingw.org/ get gcc, binutils and the windows api files, make 
sure it's install location is in the $PATH variable (thats the small 
variant if you just want a compiler)

- http://cygwin.com/ get setup.exe, run it. then select "install from 
internet" select devel/gcc mingw and binutils packages. (this is the 
larger variant, gcc installs a lot of un*x compatibily tools too and it 
provides a POSIX emulation. it also has it's own python version, you 
don't need that usualy)


then to compile and install extensions (in both cases) use
python setup.py build --compiler=mingw32 install

as long as you dont need to debug broken packages, you probably don't 
even care if there is a C compiler running or not..


when py2exe would use the distutils stuff to run the compiler i wouldn't 
see a problem to compile custom exe stubs for "non-C" people.

some time ago, i have once played around using distutils to create 
custom DLLs with an embedded python interpreter. i had to implement a 
custom distutils command (a variant of the extensions builder), but 
that's no problem, thats the same that py2exe does :-)

maybe it would be helpful if there was a all in one installer for the 
gcc compiler, so that one does not have to get several archives.
but i think the compiler and py2exe should be separate, as some people 
would like to use other compilers for some reasons (strange reasons ;-) 
and not everyone needs the compiler and it adds quite some bytes to the 
download size.

chris