[Pythonmac-SIG] py2app Enforces Directory Structure? (original) (raw)

Erik Westra ewestra at gmail.com
Thu Dec 23 01:31:06 CET 2004

Hi Bob,

I just wanted to mention that there are designated places to put files like that, and "relative to wherever the application might be" is Not That Place. See the "Where To Put Application Files" section of The_ _Mac OS X File System._

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I've had a detailed read, and thought about this and discussed it with my boss somewhat. While this is too radical a step to take right now, I have changed our system so that the placement of the data files can be changed in the future simply by changing one function within a utility module (previously, all references to data files used os.path.join("..", "dir", "filename"), hardwiring the directory placement, which was awful). At present, I've set this function up to work the "bad" way you described in one of your earlier E-Mails on this topic -- by accessing the data relative to the application bundle itself. But if I can convince the others in our company that it's a good idea, I can easily change this in future by changing that one data-access function, so that, for example, all the app's data is stored in a sub-directory within ~/Library/Application Support.

Anyway, enough on this. I just wanted to thank you for the fantastic work you've done on py2app. I'm amazed -- I've packaged our company's various applications to work under Linux and Windows, using both the MacMillan Installer and py2exe, and py2app is by far the most trouble-free solution I've ever found (once you helped me out with getting sibling modules importing correctly). The system I bundled up last night makes heavy use of wxPython, docutils, PIL, pySQLite, and ReportLab -- and it all works perfectly right out of the box. The generated application is slightly bigger than the Windows version (the compressed disk image is 11 megs, compared with 8 megs for the equivalent installer under Windows), but that's acceptable. I can't believe that py2app simply handled all the dependencies and complexities of these various tools right out of the box.

Keep up the great work! And thanks again...

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