[Python-Dev] Packaging and binary distributions for Python 3.3 (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Thu Oct 13 21:42:13 CEST 2011

On 13 October 2011 20:28, Tim Golden <mail at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:

On 13/10/2011 19:36, Paul Moore wrote:

I don't really understand the benefits of bdistmsi over bdistwininst Just commenting on this particular issue: in essence, the .MSI format is the Microsoft standard, something which is especially important for corporate rollouts. We're not particularly bureaucratic, but I recently had to bundle a small number of common extensions as .msi packages so they could be deployed easily onto our baseline machines. I'm not saying that Python must have .msi support for this reason: if it didn't already, you could argue that it could be provided by corporates who needed this, or by 3rd party service providers, if only by providing light .msi wrappers round standard installers.

Thanks for the clarification. I can see why this would be important. But maintaining 3 different interfaces to do essentially the same thing (collect some data from the user, then based on that data put the same set of files in the same places) seems a waste of effort, and a recipe for discrepancies in capabilities.

Maybe the wininst and MSI installers should ultimately become simple UIs around a zipfile and an invocation of the packaging APIs? Not that I'm offering to do that work, I'm afraid...

Paul.

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