[PyQt] Inter-office distribution/installation of packages/modules

[Erik Janssens]

Hi,

I would not agree with using Py2exe, while the idea is nice, we have had
many
issues with it, basically for 2 reasons :

- it's dependency analysis, in combination with automatic updates : if your
update
  uses a part of a package that was not used in the original package, you
need to
  redeploy everything, instead of just the part of your app that you update

- it changes the 'environment' your app runs in (eg sys.path), while it is
possible
  to work around it in your app, you need to make sure that none of the
packages
  you use make certain assumption on the environment

This combination means that in order to properly test your application, you
need
to continuously rebuild your app with py2exe, and run it. notice some error,
fix it,
rebuild, etc.  This takes far too much time.

So what we did was :

- build a custom python distro with all 'binary' packages included we need
that
  does not depend on registry settings and does not conflict with
potentially other
  pythons installed on the machine, so we can develop, test and deploy in
  exactly the same environment

  http://www.python-camelot.com/cpd.html

- build an auto-update & monitoring service around it that was integrated
with
  setuptools and buildbot


http://www.conceptive.be/downloads/camelot/doc/sphinx/build/advanced/deployment.html

we serve more than 100 sites with this combination.  updating the app is
just
pressing the buildbot button which will run unittests, build a package and
push
it to the end users.

Regards,

Erik

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 7:13 PM, James Polk <jpolk5001 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> Apologies if this is too off-topic,....but I'd like to propose a discussion
> of
> how-to's and where-fore's regarding distributing python modules to a
> user-base.
>
> Recently, I've been using Mark Hammond's excellent pywin32 packages,
> along with NumPy and PyOpenGL,etc.  I have a user-base of approx 40 or so,
> who will need these packages added to their base Python install.
>
> Rather than visit 40 separate desktops, I used "pip"  (pip freeze) to get a
> short list of packages outside the base install, and wrote an app that each
> user can run to find what's missing, and initiate the appropriate
> install,etc.
> Then I realized that "pip" itself was a 3rd party package!..DOh!
>
> I can fall back and use "help('modules')" to generate a new list, but it
> lists
> *everything* in the install,...usable but not as succinct, for pywin32 for
> example,
> it lists about a dozen things with a form of "win32" in them,...and doesn't
> appear
> to return the real package name that is associated with the binary
> installation file.
>
> Surely these issues are fairly common phenomena in many workplaces,etc...
> I'm wondering if anybody out there has any knowledge, tips, or experiences
> regarding this issue that they can share.
>
> I've found "moduleFinder", and various ideas about searching "sys.path",
> pkgutils, but nothing else that seems like a long term viable and/or
> elegant solution.
>
> Thoughts anyone?
>
> Thanks,
> -Jim
>
>
>
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>
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