[pygame] New tool for building Windows installers

[Thomas Kluyver <takowl@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I'd like to invite people to test out Pynsist, my new open source tool to build Windows installers for Python applications.

For instance, this is all I had to write to make an installer for the 'Aliens' example included in pygame:
https://github.com/takluyver/pynsist/blob/master/examples/pygame/installer.cfg

Using a pygame installer downloaded from Christoph Gohlke's site, I can even build the installer on Linux and have it work on Windows.

Pynsist never tries to make an exe of your application, unlike freeze tools such as cx_Freeze and Pyinstaller. Instead, it installs your code along with a copy of Python, and creates start menu shortcuts to launch your Python code directly. This produces bigger installers (but not huge - Aliens is 27MB), but it is less brittle. Freeze tools often have problems with packages that don't expect to be frozen, or break when a new version of Python comes out; Pynsist avoids these issues.

Pynsist supports Python 3.3+ and Python 2.7.

To install and use Pynsist, see the documenation:
http://pynsist.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Thanks,
Thomas