[TiddlyWeb] provide frozen binaries to simplify installation

[cdent]

Adoption could be greatly facilitated by providing a simple, dependency-less binary.

py2app and py2exe allow the creation of one-piece solutions for OS X and Windows.

[FND]

Milestone set to 1.0 beta, as it might significantly increase the number of people willing to participate in an open beta test.

[FND]

From a recent  packaging discussion:

Python has py2exe and py2app that make Windows executables and Mac applications (respectively) from a collection of python modules and assorted other bits of code. They are fiddly but I'm told get the job done once you get past the fiddling stage. On the Linux side, making rpms and debs is not that hard and there are support tools for making it happen.

In fact distutils + Setuptools (the project from whence easy_instal hails) has these commands:

    bdist_rpm         create an RPM distribution
    bdist_wininst     create an executable installer for MS Windows
    py2app            create a Mac OS X application or plugin from Python scripts
    bdist_mpkg        create a Mac OS X mpkg distribution for Installer.app

But each takes some poking tweaking, etc to get going.

[cdent]

I have done explorations with py2app enough to prove that it will be possible to get things working. However there are barriers related to different 64 and 32 bit architectures and python installlations on various macs. The solution is apparently to use clean MacPorts? installed Python but I don't have that going right now so going to postpone this ticket for another time. I will however commit the changes necessary to get started thinking about these things.

Other notes: py2app can't deal with a python script that doesn't end in .py. And it will resolve symlinks. So for now I have hard linked twanager and macapp.py.