Freezing Python (was Re: [Python-Dev] 2.4 news reaches interesting places) (original) (raw)

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Thu Dec 9 22:30:30 CET 2004

On Dec 9, 2004, at 4:20 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:

On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 10:30, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

ISTR that for a long time, Visual Basic actually did the same thing. A few magazines mentioned the fact, but nobody really cared. However, if this is really a concern, bundle Pyrex as well. Both Pyrex and py2exe are distutils-based, so at that point you have a complete solution, including the "C" meme as well as the ".exe" meme. As an aside, I wonder if there's interest in collaborating on freeze tools among the various existing solutions here. I've recently needed to look at this and I chose cxFreeze, primarily because it supported the platforms I needed. It's a very good tool. I've had some conversations with Anthony Tuininga on the cxFreeze mailing list and there seems to be some interest in perhaps putting together a SIG or something.

That's certainly worth doing. Currently we have, in general use, at least cx_Freeze, py2exe, and py2app.

I have been abstracting away a lot of the dependency finding issues in py2app into a cross-platform module called modulegraph <http://svn.red-bean.com/bob/py2app/trunk/src/modulegraph/>.
Modulegraph supercedes the standard library modulefinder. Because it uses a graph data structure, it gives you the flexibility say "pydoc doesn't really depend on Tkinter". It also has functionality that lets you specify implicit dependencies (via PyImport_.. or such), so that it plays nicely enough with C extensions.

This code is basically at the point where py2exe and cx_Freeze could import it and use it instead of modulefinder (with a small amount of hacking, the API is different).

-bob

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