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Wrapping Python ?

Roger Binns rogerb at rogerbinns.com
Sat Sep 25 17:06:57 EDT 2004 
USCode wrote:
> subdirectory. From the Starkit website - "A Starkit creates the
> illusion of a "file system in a file" - on the outside, it's a single
> file, yet the application code continues to see a complete directory
> of scripts, extensions, packages, images, and whatever other files it
> needs."

So what is done about shared libraries?  Python includes a number of
shared libraries (dll/so), several of which can end up being needed, even
by relatively simple apps.  On Windows, the Python interpretter itself
is a shared library (python23.dll).  For a more non-trivial app such
as my BitPim program, there are 45 libraries that end up needing to be
packaged.  (A lot of this is because it is common practise to split
larger packages such as wxPython and win32all into numerous independent
sub-libraries).

py2exe and tools like that (eg cx-Freeze) do package everything into
one file, except the shared libraries are left as seperate files,
and user files are as well (since you have to have seperate files
anyway for the libraries).

The problem with shared libraries is that they have to be seperate
files for the OS to load them properly.  One variant of the McMillan
installer effectively extracted them at run time, but that introduces
a whole host of problems such as the user needing write permission to
the filesystem, security (eg a shared /tmp), and that the libraries
may not end up being shared between processes (due to being extracted
to different locations for security reasons).

I tried the demo (Fractal Mountains) and can't see how it deals with
the shared library issue.

Roger
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