Xpra: Ticket #1528: cx_freeze 5 support on MS Windows

Follow up from #678, needed for #1527.

The version of cx_Freeze currently shipped by msys2 is 4.3.3, and it works well enough for our needs. Version 5 breaks all sort of things, and contains some unfixed bugs... but we need it to be able to create a service (#1527), and msys2 is bound to update eventually - we'd better be ready for that.

Issues:

Scary how many of the tickets on the cx_freeze bug tracker are old and unanswered.

The resulting installation is still completely broken... so maybe we need some of the ignored bugs / pull requests:

cx_freeze can generate an MSI installer, but there is no documentation on how that works: [https://bitbucket.org/anthony_tuininga/cx_freeze/issues/48/ Documentation of how to create desktop or program menu shortcut in Windows]

What a mess.



Tue, 23 May 2017 14:33:39 GMT - Antoine Martin: priority, status, description changed

Looks like the actual bug tracker to use is not sourceforge or bitbucket, but this one now: https://github.com/anthony-tuininga/cx_Freeze/issues.

New issues:

Shame we can't use another project, py2exe doesn't work with our mingw setup.


Tue, 23 May 2017 15:02:40 GMT - Antoine Martin: attachment set

fix cx_freeze to load libraries from the directory it created


Tue, 23 May 2017 15:28:54 GMT - Antoine Martin:

The patch attached (attachment/ticket/1528/cx-freeze-lib.patch) is based on the workaround suggested in No module named __startup__: I can confirm that copying/moving the files from the "lib" directory into same directory as the exe file does work. Extra hacks in r15933 for #1527.

With the cx_freeze 5 workarounds from r15932, we can now generate an installation directory that mostly works. Still TODO:


Thu, 25 May 2017 06:10:28 GMT - Antoine Martin: priority, milestone changed

This is too much work, too much breakage - stub service removed in r15960. Will use a shim for writing the service instead, see ticket:1527#comment:4.

We can re-visit when we really have no other choice, and hopefully the cx_freeze 5.x branch will have matured a bit by then.


Wed, 21 Jun 2017 09:29:12 GMT - Antoine Martin:

MSYS2 has started pushing version 5.. PITA.

So until this is all fixed, we need to pin the package with:

echo "IgnorePkg   = mingw-w64-i686-python3-cx_Freeze mingw-w64-i686-python2-cx_Freeze" >> /etc/pacman.conf

For new installations, it is a bit more tricky as downgrades are not possible with pacman, so r16111 switches to using setuptools to install version 4 - just have to hope that this results in a working installation and that the PKGBUILD for version 4 won't need to be revived from version control. (untested - I dare not mess with this stuff since my system works!)


Mon, 03 Jul 2017 13:04:45 GMT - Antoine Martin:

I've copied an archive of the working cx freeze versions here: http://xpra.org/pkg/

And as of r16175, that's the package we install.


Mon, 10 Jul 2017 14:06:44 GMT - Antoine Martin: priority, milestone changed

Blocker for #1574. Raising.


Mon, 17 Jul 2017 13:48:04 GMT - Antoine Martin:

It might be easier to switch to http://www.pyinstaller.org/. Their documentation is a lot better.


Thu, 28 Sep 2017 07:21:52 GMT - Antoine Martin:

As per comment:1, we can't use pyinstaller as we can no longer use pywin32.

Despite some ugly workarounds in r16970 and using attachment/ticket/1528/cx-freeze-lib.patch, cx_freeze 5.0.2 still fails to package things properly: No module named __startup__ and the workarounds suggested require messing with the pacman build files as building with pip fails on MSYS2...

Even after manually installing the git v5.x version, some problems remain:


Fri, 29 Sep 2017 11:43:27 GMT - Antoine Martin:


Mon, 06 Nov 2017 08:43:40 GMT - Antoine Martin:

Note: the 64-bit builds now use cx_Freeze version 5.x (with manual patching since 5.0.2 is so buggy..)


Mon, 22 Jan 2018 05:46:52 GMT - Antoine Martin: status, milestone changed; resolution set

The python2 / GTK2 builds will remain on the 4.x branch, the 5.x branch works for python3 / GTK3.


Fri, 03 Aug 2018 20:16:42 GMT - Antoine Martin:

r20018 re-enables cx_freeze from the msys2 repositories rather than holding it back at an older version. Packaging works for both python2 and python3 with this version (5.1.1-2)


Sat, 23 Jan 2021 05:26:47 GMT - migration script:

this ticket has been moved to: https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/issues/1528