Q: Packaged version of pixi-gui

[melund]

In a comparative environment we are distributing pixi, though an internal Windows package manager. It is the only way people are allowed to use pixi.

I would really like to do something similar with pixi-gui, so it is available by default to all users.

Do you have any plans for supporting a package-up version of pixi-gui. Like building it into an exe file.

[wolfv]

Hi @melund - we are discussing to add a "install with Pixi GUI" option to the graphical Pixi installer on Windows (an MSI I think).

What do you think about that?

[melund]

@wolfv. I am currently building pixi with self-update disabled and --no-default-features --feature native-tls. So if that could also be an option to the MSI installer, then maybe that would work.

I really think that "Install with Pixi GUI" is a great idea.

But what does it do? Does it ship a global python environment with pixi-gui inside? Or can it work with just the "pixi-gui.exe" standalone?

[wolfv]

The current idea was to "just" call pixi global install pixi-gui" from inside the installer. That would give you a regular pixi GUI installation but would require internet access at installation time. Would love to hear your thoughts

[melund]

I don't know if that will work in our 'slightly' outdated corp system for handling windows installations. For many corp environments it is also a requirement that package come from internal proxies of pypi/conda-forge.

But how much does stuff (dependencies) in the pixi-gui environment does it need? I was thinking of thinking of just including the pixi-gui.exe together with the pixi.exe file. Does pixi-gui.exe need environment activation before it can run on Windows?

[melund]

@wolfv, I would love to try the proposed solution with the MSI for pixi, once it is ready.

But native-tls, and disabled 'self-update' is needed for the installer as well 😓.

I was thinking the corp install process would be pushing out a 'config.toml' file with the correct mirror settings, then running a silent installer with the correct flags to also install pixi-gui, disable 'self-update', and use 'native-tls'.

[melund]

@wolfv. It seems like I can just take the pixi-gui.exe and the DLLs and place them together with pixi.exe, when the binaries are rolled out in our org. Then we get a solution that is working.