Publish a downloadable windows installer?

[jgeewax]

Is this worthwhile? Lots of people want the MSI....

[dhermes]

...which people? These people must not be GitHub users? (FWIW we've seen #1009, which reports an issue with PyCrypto. But we don't strictly need to rely on PyCrypto.)

@tseaver Do you have any experience building an MSI? @jgeewax Do you (or know anyone, maybe on the gcloud CLI team) that does?

I Googled around for a bit and found pynsist and pyinstaller but they don't really seem to do the trick.

[tseaver]

@dhermes My experience is limited to supporting the folks who manage winbot.zope.org, which builds the Windows binaries (.egg and .exe) for the Zope-related packages. I can dig into how that machine is configured, if desired, but I haven't run Windows anywhere for more than fifteen years.

[dhermes]

It seems someone is trying to solve this problem in a big way:

https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/appveyor.html
http://www.appveyor.com/

[dhermes]

Seems we could have Appveyor only build on tags: http://www.appveyor.com/docs/branches

@tseaver Do you know if it's easy to add a file (i.e. a Windows MSI) to an existing PyPI upload? Or maybe we should stop pushing new versions from Travis and just do it from Appveyor?

[tseaver]

@dhermes You can upload additional dists to an already-registered and uploaded release, even from different machines / accounts (as long as the uploading account has the maintainer role): winbot.zope.org polls for new sdist releases to its package set and builds/uploads the Windows-specific binary distributions.

E.g.:

$ python setup.py register sdist upload
$ python setup.py bdist_whatever upload

[dhermes]

Working on this today

[dhermes]

@jgeewax and I just discussed. Since we don't have any native code, our wheels and MSI can be built on any platform, so we just need to add msi (and maybe wininst) to the Travis distributions.

[dhermes]

Update: Running python setup.py bdist_msi completely fails

error: invalid command 'bdist_msi'

and python setup.py bdist_wininst runs but fails to complete with

Warning: Can't read registry to find the necessary compiler setting
Make sure that Python modules _winreg, win32api or win32con are installed.
error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/command/wininst-6.0.exe', /usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/command/wininst-6.0.exe not included in the Debian packages.

This seems to contradict a comment from the docs:

These installers can even be created on Unix platforms or Mac OS X.