[PyKDE] PyQt as a statically compiled shared library...

[Truls A. Tangstad]

Our software package[1] is getting to have a nest of dependencies[2],
some of which can be pretty hard to fulfill for an average user. We
have so far targeted users on Windows and Debian Unstable, and for
these users installation is pretty easy.

The windows installation uses py2exe to package everything while on
debian we can simply just let our debian package depend on current
versions in the standard debian unstable repository.

What we're aiming for now though is making installation easier for
users on different linux systems to install our software without
having to satisfy all dependencies manually.

We have so far tested cxFreeze and McMillan installer. None of them
could successfully package the libraries we used (lots of problems
with undefined symbols in the result, together with lots of manual
labour).

My though (which might be naïve) is to compile statically linked
binaries of the libraries/programs we directly depend on and then
provide them together with our software, modifying
LD_LIBRARY_PATH/PYTHONPATH on startup. Is it possible to create a
qt.so (with friends) that is statically linked against all its
dependencies, or is it a nightmare of manual labour?

Is there another approach which might be better for getting a
no-brainer installation usable across linux distros of a pyqt program?
(for example not requiring user to install pyqt first)


[1] - SciCraft - http://www.scicraft.com
[2] - Numeric, PyQt (with Qt and Sip), RPy (With R and BioConductor),
      Octave, VTK (with python bindings), PyQwt (with Qwt)

-- 
Truls A. Tangstad - <kerfue+pykde at h e r o c a m p.org>