Re: [pygame] Introducing Pygame Launcher alpha

[Bob Ippolito <bob@redivi.com>]

On Oct 22, 2004, at 3:05, Sami Hangaslammi wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 02:43:04 -0400, Bob Ippolito <bob@redivi.com> 
> wrote:
>
> > - The user saves some disk space and bandwidth *if and only if* Pygame
> > Launcher is popular amongst developers.  Otherwise you're just making
> > the user download two things (the launcher and your pyg) instead of
> > just getting your application.
> I agree. The launcher has to be adopted by several developers to be
> really useful. But even if only a few developers use it, I think it
> still makes updating your application and downloading those updates
> more convenient.
Possibly, it depends on the size of your application versus the size of 
the launcher..  On Mac OS X 10.3+ for example, the user already has 
Python 2.3 as part of the stock configuration, so you don't need to 
include that (unless you want to support earlier versions of Mac OS X).

> > - A single pyg might work correctly across several platforms.  You 
> > only
> > need to offer one download link and it will support any platform that
> > Pygame Launcher supports.  However, in my experience, in order for the
> > application to be well liked you'll still need to make some
> > platform-specific accommodations.
> Sure, you still have to take into account the platform differences in
> UI etc. But I consider it a pretty big plus that I wouldn't have to
> make three separate stand-alone packages with pyexe, py2app and ..what
> ever Linux uses. Does py2app, for example, run on other platforms, or
> would have to have someone else create the .app for me?
No, py2app isn't going to run on Windows any time soon.  It could, it's 
pure python and relatively few places would need to change, but it 
would be a burden to support so I'm not going to.

> > .. but it does have a bunch of downsides, for developers anyway.  The
> > largest of which being that the platform is inflexible.  You're stuck
> > with a subset of the standard library and specific versions of a 
> > couple
> > useful packages.  Anything other than that must be done in pure 
> > Python.
> Extensions cannot be included in the .pyg file, because Python doesn't
> support loading .pyd and .dll files from archives (they could be
> extracted to a temporary folder each time the pyg is run, but that's
> messy). However, if you don't mind distributing several files instead
> of one .pyg file, the launcher could trivially support loading .pyd
> files that are distributed alongside the .pyg.
But then you lose cross-platform support, or you need to round up 
extensions on all supported platforms, which is non-trivial unless you 
have access to all three platforms.

-bob