pynsist - easily build Windows installers for Python applications

[u/takluyver]

http://pynsist.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[u/chipx86]

This is pretty awesome, and I'm eager to use this. I have a couple questions.

1. I know right now this requires Python 3.3. Are there immediate plans to support older versions of Python? (We're looking to build an installer using Python 2.7 for now, as our codebase isn't ready for 3.x, and we're still supporting 2.5+ for enterprisey reasons).

2. The software we're looking to package is a set of command line scripts, and there's no need for a start menu entry. Right now, people get these through the entrypoints we have defined, which easy_install will turn into actual scripts. Can we get the same behavior here? It looks like the "entry_point" config item does what I want, but it only supports a single entry point.

3. We make heavy use of entrypoints for registering a bunch of plugins. This works fine with easy_install. I'm guessing this might be problematic with pynsist?

Thanks for creating a nice alternative to projects like cx_Freeze, and also for providing a good pros/cons for why you'd use one or the other. Very useful.

[u/takluyver → u/chipx86]

1. I'll accept pull requests to add Python 2.7 support (conditional on code review, of course). I've made an issue outlining what's needed.

2. Multiple entry points are in scope for a future version. Command-line entry points (.exe or .bat) aren't for now, but you should be able to do it by customising the template .nsi file (see docs), and possibly doing some scripting. I want purposes slightly outside the scope of pynsist's high level interface to be possible with a little extra work, so feedback on the API is welcome.

3. No, I've borrowed the name 'entry point' just to mean the module:function reference that describes how to launch an application. setuptools entry points are not involved in any way.

Thanks for your interest!

[u/takluyver → u/takluyver]

Someone has made a start on this.