Sigil Windows Portable Beta

[DiapDealer]

This may, or may not, become a part of the official Sigil distribution at some point (depending on interest/response).

I had no intentions of creating a Portable build, but I became intrigued by the challenge after inspecting the PortableApps version of Sigil and discovering that it wasn't actually completely portable! Oh, the main program is portable enough, but the plugin framework is not.

The bundled python interpreter in the PortableApps version can't use its own included python library. It looks to the location of the Official Sigil installation's python for its modules. If that's not installed, it looks for a system installed python. If it can't find that ... the plugin interpreter crashes. So in essence, if Sigil (a recent version) or Python isn't already installed on a machine, the PortableApps Sigil ain't running any plugins.

So anyway, here's my attempt at a fully-portable, self-contained version of Sigil for Windows. All it is, is a completely stock 32-bit version of Sigil v0.9.4 launched with a wrapper (source attached to post--many thanks to Kovid/calibre for inspiration) that:

A) sets the environment variable that relocates where Sigil stores its settings

B) modifies the pyvenv.cfg file (in the Sigil\python3 folder) that tells the bundled python interpreter where to find it's modules.

C) Finds "itself" and runs! (hopefully)

I've created an "installer" because I figured it would be easier to upgrade that way: just "install" the new version over top of the old.

It looks like this on disk:

Sigil-Portable\
+++Sigil\
+++SigilData\ (created after first run)
+++Sigil-Portable.exe

Double-click Sigil-Portable.exe to run.

Download link (Google Drive):
Sigil-0.9.4-Windows-Portable-Setup
(Vista minimum)

P.S. This thing's never going to be a multi-simultaneous-user application, so don't slap it on a network drive and try to use it like that. Put it on your hard-drive/thumb-drive and use it that way.

[DiapDealer]

ACK! I thought I'd taken non-ascii named folders into account, but it appears I've failed. My apologies. Please install it to a path that contains ascii-only characters until I discover where I went wrong.

[eschwartz]

Looks like the PortableApps people didn't realize that the pyvenv.cfg file existed and needed to be updated.

It should be an easy fix -- I've posted in their support forum that they need to add another FileWrite element to make sure it gets updated as needed.

[GordCaswell]

I am one of the developers at PortableApps.com.

Thanks, DiapDealer, for noticing the problem.

As indicated above, we weren't aware of a fix for this particular issue. However, as it's now been pointed out, we'll ensure it gets fixed ASAP.

[DiapDealer]

Pretty easy to overlook in the grand scheme of things.

Might want to let them know that they'll need to duplicate the msvc(p|r) runtime files (both the 100 and the 120) in the Sigil\python3 directory, as well. Profiling with Dependency Walker while running the test plugin reveals that Python ctypes access to the hunspell.dll looks to the Windows\System folder for the runtimes if they're not adjacent to the Python interpreter/dll.

If they get it going, I may just leave them to it. As to the file-paths with non-ansi characters ... that may be a non-starter. The python interpreter can't seem to cope with a file-path that has non-ansi characters in the "home" entry of the pyvenv.cfg file (at least on Windows). Can't win 'em all I guess.