Tom,
Is sdl2 Pygame the way forward for Pygame?
I think it is - but I'm biased about this. And pygame_sdl2 is far from ready - there's no test suite, for example. All I can say is that I need/plan to maintain pygame_sdl2 indefinitely to support Ren'Py. (Or at least until a better implementation of the Pygame API comes about.)
I would be interested in assisting with a generic Pygame packager for cross platform applications. Where would we get started in doing that, to separate it from Ren'Py in a generic way?
I'd suggest grabbing a copy of the Ren'Py SDK (from
www.renpy.org), creating a new project, and building distributions of it, just to get a feel for what the tools can do in terms of installing text editors and packaging games for various platforms.
My thinking is the right thing to would be to modify the Ren'Py launcher so that it can be rebranded and released as a pygame tool, as opposed to trying to make something standalone. This is for pragmatic reasons - maintaining a split version would be more ongoing work that coming up with a variant of the launcher that can launch and package arbitrary pygame apps.
That being said, all the Ren'Py packager does is to copy various files into zip or tar.bz2 files with appropriate permissions info, so if someone wants to make a standalone tool or distribution, they can.