Our primary concern at this stage is deployment for Windows users.

There's two things we have to do:

  1. Package a standalone Python program which can be run without requiring third party libraries to be installed
  2. Guide the user through Installation on their machine.

Packaging

  •  Py2Exe - proven tool for packaging a standalone Python program for Windows
  • python win-setup.py py2exe
  •  Py2App - tool for packaging a standalone Python program for Mac OSX
  •  cx_Freeze - an alternative which might be worth looking at

Building

  •  A-A-P is a Python-based tool for downloading, building, and installing software written by Bram Moolenaar. It uses a collection of recipes, which can specify dependencies and build commands.
  •  SCons is also Python-based and came out of the Software Carpentry competition a few years ago. It also aims to be a cross-platform super make.
  •  sugar-jhbuild is a single custom Python script you download and it is smart enough to download/build all of the other software you need to build the  Sugar Python environment for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). We could make a similar custom, cross-platform script for eXe.

Installation