Monday, February 16, 2015

ANN: hexdump 3.2 - packaged and pretty executable

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/hexdump

The new version doesn't add much to the API, but completes a significant research about executable .zip packages with proof of concept distribution that is both an installable Python package that you can upload to PyPI and an executable .zip archive.

The benefit is that you may drop .zip package downloaded from PyPI into your source code repository and invoke it from your helper scripts as python hexdump-3.2.zip Keeping dependencies together with application source code in repository may seem like a bad idea, but we find it useful at Gratipay to setup project from checkout in offline mode with no internet connection.

The solution required three modifications to distutils setup.py (see sources):
  • force sdist command to produce .zip file
  • strip extra dir created at PyPI package root
  • add __main__.py to make .zip executable

If you think that it is cool and should be promoted further, feel free to test Gratipay to send me 0.01+, and I'll get the signal to spend more time on reversing native distutils/packaging gotchas.