Binary packages support

[vit9696]

Hey,

Thanks for the tool, several members of our team found it quite useful, especially the possibility to run non-macOS operating systems. While we believe automatic generation features may not be of any good use, the rest appears to look solid.

We wonder whether there is a possibility for binary packages/releases to appear:

• For macOS that would be application bundles. You can package scripts as they are right into the bundle and create a manifest to help macOS to identify them. We have a sample here in case there exist any technical questions.
• For Windows there are several packing tools, like py2exe and pyinstaller. See for more links here.

Also, somebody noticed that drag and drop does not work in macOS, but I am actually unsure whether this is a technical limitation of the underlying ui kit or not and thus am not creating an issue for it.

[corpnewt]

Hello,

I'm glad you've found it useful. I can look into setting up releases - but is there any explicit advantage to that over executing the scripts themselves?

I did just test drag and drop in macOS (10.14.5 18F127a with the default python 2.7.10 and python 3.6.0) and items rearranged as intended, so I'm not sure if there's a version discrepancy, or some other issue.

-CorpNewt

[vit9696]

For releases the main benefit is to be able to set up file associations and make double clicking on plists causing an app bundle to open and work properly.

For drag and drop the issue, from what I understood, was being able to double click the text, drag it and drop to the value. I would normally go with cmd+c/cmd+v, but perhaps the former is more useful to some Mac users.

Vit

Hi vit and corpnewt,

I added basic support for binary packaging, using py2app and py2exe in #2

Drag and drop is currently not yet supported, but would be a nice thing to have

[dhinakg]

I can help with automatic binary package generation (using Travis CI), given a script or instructions on how to build - camiel's #2 PR will work fine.

[vit9696]

The suggested approach makes sense to me, but I guess only @corpnewt can make decisions here.

[corpnewt]

I'll look into the supplied PRs today and see what makes the most sense for the project. Thanks for the input and help @camielverdult @dhinakg @vit9696

-CorpNewt

[corpnewt]

@vit9696 I looked into a few different options with the binary releases - and what I think I've finally settled on is packing things similar to WhateverName (for macOS, at least).

However, regardless of what I've tried, I haven't found a way to parse multiple OpenDocument events with one instance of the script. Each time I've tried, a new instance is opened. This was a larger issue prior when the node copy methods saved only internally - but I recently adjusted it to utilize the system clipboard with a formatted plist string instead, which should hopefully mitigate that specific issue. The only remaining struggle is having multiple instances open and needing to quit them all.

If that's not beyond the realm of reason, I'll add that as-is. Sorry for taking awhile with looking into it, but as-is, it still doesn't seem terribly clean.

-CorpNewt

[vit9696]

Hey,

I see how it is now. Indeed it is a little inconvenient, but to be honest it actually could become a benefit to my eyes. A separate instance per file is probably easier to manage except window management.

As for bundling, I would say either is fine on Mac, and on Windows it would be nice to have a single exe file.

Vit

[corpnewt]

Sounds good - I'll get that pushed in the next day or two. Thanks for your patience.

-CorpNewt

[vit9696]

No worries, it is not like we are hurrying anywhere =)

[corpnewt]

I added a sub-script called buildapp.command in the Scripts directory that will create an app bundle on macOS. Let me know if that does what is needed.

-CorpNewt

[vit9696]

Thanks a lot. Pretty much, we tested it here, and it seems to work about right, though feels a bit lonely without an icon (maybe something standard could do?).

Now that macOS is ok, I hope Windows gets some love as well, which is somewhat important, as many people do not have python installed. And afterwards it will be nice to have files published in releases to let ordinary people download the intuitively (perhaps with CI?).

[jayvdb]

You may want to look at @Nuitka ; it has good support for most GUI libraries, and the devs are quite responsive.

[vit9696]

Is this going to be resolved? I kind of expect to be able to download .app and .exe files. Thanks.

[corpnewt]

I should be able to work on it this weekend. Thanks for your patience.

-CorpNewt