Portable support enhancement ideas (reboot)

[villares]

This thread is a reboot of #57.

Moving the portable around makes it necessary to update Thonny's JAVA_HOME preferences.

I'm looking at this situation:

• We download a Thonny 4.x.x portable and install the thonny-py5mode plug-in.
• First activation of "imported mode for py5" downloads the JDK-17 as expected, everything wonderful.
• Then, when one moves the portable folder around, it breaks: The JDK is there in the right place, but the JAVA_HOME information in Thonny's configs/options gets outdated.
• Turning the "imported mode for py5" option on and off makes it work again, but we can't count on people finding it out, and the error makes it seem a confusing user experience.

How could we improve this?

I don't like overriding something the user might change in the options panel manually but this is what my current portable does and it works: https://github.com/villares/thonny-portable-with-py5

I'd like to check if Thonny "is portable" and make the plug-in update JAVA_HOME on launch (we can know by using this info https://github.com/thonny/thonny/blob/7494d7148d1566c3e27bc8250d1c1138bc308f21/thonny/__init__.py#L165 ).
The whole point is I don't want to maintain a slightly hacked version of the plug-in for use with my "portable with pre-installed py5 bundle".

Was there once a portable Thonny on MacOS? Can we/someone build one again?

It looks like so, I wish we could have it again. Is the new Intel vs. Apple Silicon divide an impeditive?

• Old Mac packaging script found on Thonny's repo https://github.com/thonny/thonny/blob/7494d7148d1566c3e27bc8250d1c1138bc308f21/packaging/mac/create_portable_dmg_from_build.sh#L10
• Aivar's instructions for packaging for Mac Does anyone else wish for a Thonny "portable" for MacOS? thonny/thonny#3090

[hx2A]

Can we learn from how Thonny packaging is done?

https://github.com/thonny/thonny/tree/master/packaging

I mean, can't we do whatever they are doing but with py5 and some other libraries included?

Is the new Intel vs. Apple Silicon divide an impeditive?

My default assumption is that it will be a problem but when I look at the Thonny packaging stuff I don't see 2 Thonny MacOS installers. Maybe this approach would avoid that headache? One can always dream.

[villares]

The instructions from Aivar I mentioned above are very complete, it can be done. I wish we had someone with an Apple Dev Account for signing/notarizing...

My fear is that we would need 2 Mac installers not because of Thonny itself, but because of stuff like NumPy or Pillow that might require different binaries for different architectures.

[hx2A]

My fear is that we would need 2 Mac installers not because of Thonny itself, but because of stuff like NumPy or Pillow that might require different binaries for different architectures.

Oh right, that's true. If we want it to be totally self contained, with no downloads, we will need two different packages to provide the correct Python libraries.