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TheRenegadeCoder / image-titler

An image title generator using The Renegade Coder style
https://therenegadecoder.com
GNU General Public License v3.0
17 stars 6 forks source link

Improve Installation Process #74

Open jrg94 opened 4 years ago

jrg94 commented 4 years ago

As much as I love using pip, the main issue right now is adoption. Most folks aren't going to go out of their way to install the required dependencies: they'll just use something else.

As I stated in #63, I want to be able to at least provide Windows support for this application. That way, we can provide an EXE or MSI installer, so users can quickly install the tool and get all the dependencies (mainly Python 3.8) in one go. In addition, I want to be able to provide a shortcut to the script, so folks don't have to use the command line to launch up our application.

That said, I'm having a incredibly frustrating time trying to put this together. I had assumed that setuptools would support something like this natively, but it doesn't. The closest I can get is the bdist command which lets me generate an MSI. I figured at that point all I'd need to do is hook in some shortcut script, but it's proving to be a huge pain in the ass.

At this point, I've tried a command that looks something like this: py setup.py bdist --target-version 3.8 --install-script winstall.py. Unfortunately, what I'm finding is that this MSI can't find Python 3.8 on my system (because it's 32-bit?), so I can't even test it. What's worse is that even when I install things locally, the install script doesn't seem to execute at all. I'm totally lost and documentation is complete trash.

As a result, I decided to try pivoting to a different installer. I figured the least I could do is try to package this program separately for Windows users, but it seems no one is supporting 3.8 yet (See https://github.com/pyinstaller/pyinstaller/issues/4311). So, I'm sort of stuck for the time being.

jrg94 commented 4 years ago

Alright, I'm trying to use cxfreeze, but it's not working. The command line interface crashes, so I tried created a setup file which is also crashing.

jrg94 commented 4 years ago

Gonna half to hold off on this, I think. I don't want to go through and remove the Python 3.8+ restriction if I'm just gonna get screwed by tools that don't work.