[pygtk] ANNOUNCE: PyGTK All-in-one Installer 2.22.5

[John Stowers]

On Sun, 2010-12-26 at 22:56 +0100, Dieter Verfaillie wrote:
> On 26/12/2010 21:05, Shin Guey Wong wrote:
> > This all in one installer is great for developer. However, the installer
> > contains lots of development files(header, static library, docs..etc) which
> > doesn't need by a user who just want to install pygtk with gtk-runtime to
> > run pygtk application.
> 
> Ah, but in my opinion developers are the intended audience not only for
> the all-in-one installer but also for the per package pyg* installers,
> the gtk+ binaries (and bundle), any other python extension installer
> ever released as .exe, .msi, .egg or source code and yes, even the
> Python installer.

Fully agree with Dieter here. This all-in-one installer is intended for
developers. To distribute programs to users py2exe actually works very
well once you have it up and running, and I suggest people use that to
distribute their python applications.

Of course some things could be done to make py2exe'ing pyGTK
applications easier, and Dieter and I have discussed what tools or
utilities we could ship with PyGObject to accomplish this. Work is
ongoing, but I suspect now that we can assume developers will be
generating their py2exe installers via this new all-in-one installer we
can make some assumptions about file locations, etc, which will
streamline the process.

John

> 
> Viewing the Python interpreter windows installer as a development tool
> and not something an end user of our applications should ever need to
> touch might come as a surprise for many people and has for a long time
> been just a "feeling" for me. Until I discovered the following comment
> by Mark Hammond [1]:
>     "My take is still that Python is a tool, not an app.  People
>      writing an app they with to distribute using Python should include
>      Python in their package (ie, not rely on an installed version) and
>      these apps should conform with the guidelines."
> 
> This comes from http://bugs.python.org/issue1284316, msg104384.
> 
> If Python is to be considered a development tool then by definition so
> are extension modules (like PyGTK). So now we have discovered why we
> have tools like py2exe. Distributing a py2exe'd application is a breeze
> (once you get the hang of it) and not only saves end users a lot of
> time, it potentially saves you a lot of support calls [2]. Remember,
> end users are rarely interested in investing time on the technical side
> of things. They just want to use our shiny applications :)
> 
> > For now, I will still use this to install on
> > development machine. But for deployment, I will recommend user to install
> > gtk-runtime from
> > http://gtk-win.sourceforge.net/home/index.php/Downloadswhich only
> > 7.46MB, then install pygtk/pycairo/pygobject which less than 2MB.
> > (10MB vs 32MB which is quite a big different. Honestly, I'm not that concern
> > on the installer size but the installing time for gtk with development files
> > take much longer. I have user asking me why it takes so long time to install
> > the gtk with development file)
> 
> Please continue to do whatever is required for your projects, the aio
> installer is offered simply as an alternative. I just wanted to clarify
> why it has been built the way it is :)
> 
> mvg,
> Dieter
> 
> [1] Yes, the same Mark Hammond that's praised on the last page of
> the Python installer: "Special Windows thanks to: Mark Hammond, without
> whose years of freely shared Windows expertise, Python for Windows
> would still be Python for DOS."
> 
> [2] For a start, simply look at the recent rise in problems with
> multiple gtk+ runtime versions on the PATH environment variable...
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