How to package executables

Louis spalax at gresille.org
Tue Jul 21 16:58:38 CEST 2020


Hi,
sorry to answer to days later, but I am in holidays with my daughter :)
which means I have even less time to hack than usual… :'(

First, to answer to Takuto as why I would want to put my python script
in texlive: when I published it on CTAN, Manfred Lotz (of the CTAN team)
mentioned that "[he] thought about how [my] package could reside in
texlive" (before giving some ideas, then redirecting me to this mailing
list). As someone else mentioned, TeX folks probably won't look for TeX
tools in Pypi, so I thought this would be nice if they could install my
program from texlive (although it is on CTAN, so tex people should be
able to find it anyways). But you know texlive better than I do, and you
are the people in charge, so I would totally understand if you decided
that spix should not be in texlive for any reason (because it's written
in python, because it's a pain to include in texlive, because of too
many issues, because…).

Now, assuming that spix has its place into texlive…

As suggested, I merged __init__.py and __main__.py files into a single
spix.py file (work is done in branch texlive [1] for those interested).
It can even simply be renamed as "spix", which would work on GNU/Linux
(and MacOS?), but maybe it would not work on Windows, as Windows
wouldn't care about the shebang, so I don't know whether this is a good
idea or not.

[1] https://framagit.org/spalax/spix/-/tree/texlive

I will write a man page.

Would a CTAN package with those files be OK?

spix/CHANGELOG.md
spix/LICENSE.txt
spix/README.md
spix/spix.py (executable)
spix/spix.pdf (documentation)
spix/spix.1 (man page)

Or should I add subdirectories (spix/bin/spix.py ? spix/man/spix.1?
other?). Then, once I uploaded it to CTAN, is there anything else I
should do, or will you (the texlive team) handle everything?

At last, once everything works, I offer to write some documentation
about how to package a python script for easy integration in texlive
based on this thread (that you would review and publish on [2]). Are you
interested (or is this just another burden for you)?

[2] https://tug.org/texlive/pkgcontrib.html#exec

Thanks for your work,
Louis


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