[Python-Dev] Python Launcher for Windows (PEP 397) needs testing! (original) (raw)

Vinay Sajip vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk
Thu Jul 7 17:19:26 CEST 2011

Paul Moore <p.f.moore gmail.com> writes:

In that case, some points:

1. A "silent by default" installer like this is not very usual in the Windows world, I'd have expected a confirmation dialog at least. For silent installs, msiexec /silent is available.

Agreed, a "success" message is probably a good idea for the standalone launcher. The installer is a bit tentative because (a) the PEP is still under discussion, and (b) I don't know exactly how launcher installation will work as part of Python installation.

2. I thought the idea from the PEP was to put py.exe/pyw.exe into a "system" location which is already on the PATH (likely windows\system32, or whatever the 64-bit equivalent is). That way, py or py -3 and similar can be used to launch the interactive interpreter.

This can always be changed in the installer - the PEP says install in System32 "if possible", and I'm not yet sure of all the security/permissions implications of that. The current location should be usable for test purposes, even if you have to manually add to the path for now.

3. Given that you're not installing in system32, you should add the install dir to PATH (and remove it on uninstall ) That's definitely a second-best option, though, so I'd rather you didn't, but installed in system32 instead

I'll look at changing the installer builds to do this.

4. If you embed both of the py.ico and pyc.ico files into the launcher exes, you wouldn't need to have them as separate files (I see py.ico is embedded already) and so the footprint becomes 2 exes and an ini file. That might be a bit more palatable for people who are uncomfortable with installing into somewhere like system32.

Otherwise it looks great.

Thanks for the feedback. Please log any implementation-related issues on the BitBucket tracker.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip

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