[chimera-dev] making a python package

[Greg Couch]

On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, William Baxter wrote:

> Hello,
>
> we would like to package our software, Spire
> (www.wadsworth.org/spider_doc/spider/docs/spire/) the way Chimera is
> packaged, with its own Python, Tcl/Tk, and other libraries. Do you have
> some documentation, or can you point me toward some resources that
> explain how to go about creating such an installation package?
>
> Thanks,
> Bill Baxter

We don't have any documentation, but here's a quick description of what we 
do binary distributions for chimera:

On Windows, we use the Inno Setup program, 
<http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php>.

For Mac OS X, we build a disk image using the hdiutil program.  And we 
modify the name all of the shared libraries with something like:
 	install_name_tool -id @executable_path/$(LIBNAME)

On Linux and other Unix systems, we use a modified self-extracting zip 
archive where an installation program is run after the files have been 
extracted.

In all cases, when chimera starts up, we set up the environment to get our 
shared libraries (and clear the environment of things that would hurt us, 
like PYTHONHOME).

 	Hope this helps,

 	Greg Couch
 	UCSF Computer Graphics Lab