New Windows "portable bundle" with Thonny IDE and py5 0.10.0a0 out!

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You can download it from here more info and suggestions for testing here

I you find any trouble, please report!

I wish I could make an AppImage equivalent for Linux (but it is beyond my skills), and also re-package the Mac OS Thonny installer to include py5 (but I don’t have a Mac or an Apple dev signing key).

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I did some searching and found this:

I can’t do this right now, but I should have time to experiment with this in the springtime.

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One thing to consider, which might make my whole idea not a good idea, is that AppImages are read-only, so they might not be a good fit for an IDE with built-in Python. How would the user install new packages? Could we target a site-packages folder outside the AppImage? I don’t know.

An alternative to the AppImage strategy could perhaps be a bash script that installs everything we want. Currently Thonny provides this: bash <(wget -O - https://thonny.org/installer-for-linux) (the running bash source)

Update: I asked a friend who is very good at bash scripts to have a look…

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Good point. If the AppImage is read only and the user could not install packages, I would guess that Thonny would give a strange error when the user tried to install something because a read only package jar would be completely unexpected.

How does Thonny package itself? Doesn’t it come with installed packages already? Why can’t we add our own package that adds a few more? It is open source after-all.

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Oh, yes, we can fork and add JDK & libraries.

  • For the MacOS “Thonny + py5 bundle” I guess this is the way forward (following instructions on that link I posted in the first message).

  • For Windows, the portable zip seems to be mostly working.

  • Then for Linux, packaging to different distro ecossystems seems lots of trouble, so I thought about the AppImage strategy, but now I’m more inclined to try to hack the bash script, which is already installing stuff.

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Interesting. I just went through the packaging directory in the Thonny repo.

It seems achievable, and the team does respond to questions. I don’t think we’d need to worry about multiple LInux distros. They don’t seem to do anything special for that for their own releases:

Let’s give this approach a try.

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