PySide2 apps now embed all Qt libraries

[albertosottile]

Since py2app 0.26, apps that use PySide2 started to include all the Qt Frameworks and libraries twice in the app: under Contents/Frameworks and under Contents/Resources/lib/python{x.y}/PySide2.

This has two effects:

• the app bundle gets incredibly bloated (more than 1 GB)
• the app itself cannot start (libraries are linked twice and/or misplaced).

I reproduced this issue with Python 3.7 and 3.9 on both PySide2 5.13.1 and 5.15.2. This issue is not present on py2app 0.24.

To facilitate reproduction and debugging on your side, I created a GitHub repository, with Actions, with code and artifacts already ready to be downloaded and inspected. I add here the links to the corresponding Actions builds. You can also easily inspect the generating code for each branch.

• PASS: cp37-pyside513-py2app024
• FAIL: cp37-pyside513-py2app0261

By inspecting the two app bundles, you can easily confirm the bug.

Side note: eventually, I managed to make an app built with py2app 0.26.1 functional. Here there are more or less the steps I had to take (see https://github.com/Syncplay/syncplay/commits/py2app):

• delete all the unneeded frameworks from Contents/Frameworks
• delete all the unneeded libraries from Contents/Resources/lib/python3.7/PySide2
• delete the PySide2/Qt/ tree from the Contents/Resources/lib/python{x.y}.zip library (this should be purely cosmetic)
• move all the .so files that were in Contents/Frameworks to Contents/Resources/lib/python3.9/PySide2'
• rebuild py2app prebuilt stubs (see #383).

[ronaldoussoren]

I don't use PySide myself and have to rely on others to help out with supporting this library. Maintaining support for various versions of PySide is a significant amount of work.

[albertosottile]

I understand your concerns. Are you aware of any version of PySide (2 or 6) that works well with later versions of py2app?