Creating Built Distributions

A “built distribution” is what you’re probably used to thinking of either as a “binary package” or an “installer” (depending on your background). It’s not necessarily binary, though, because it might contain bytecode. (And “installer” is a term specific to the world of mainstream desktop systems.)

A built distribution is how you make life as easy as possible for installers of your module distribution: for users of RPM-based Linux systems, it’s a binary RPM; for Windows users, it’s an executable installer; for Debian-based Linux users, it’s a Debian package; and so forth.

The available commands for built distributions are:

Command	Description	Notes
bdist_appimage	AppImage application bundle (.AppImage)	[1]
bdist_deb	DEB distribution (.deb)	[2] [3]
bdist_dmg	DMG disk image (.dmg)
bdist_mac	macOS application bundle (.app)
bdist_msi	Windows installer (.msi)
bdist_rpm	RPM distribution (.rpm)	[3]

Added in version 7.0: Support for the bdist_appimage and bdist_deb commands.

Notes

[1]

requires external appimagetool (the latest version is downloaded if not specified or not found).

[2]

requires external alien and fakeroot utilities.

[3] (1,2)

requires external rpm utility, version 3.0.4 or better (use rpm --version to find out which version you have).