I mean shipping people a .zip that has a simple executable that can be reliably run by end users zero external environment variable bullshit or dependencies. No Anaconda, Pip, or any of that non-sense. No fetching of dependencies either. Dead simple turn key usage.

And yeah it’s not super duper hard. It’s just not how Python projects are structured by default. Simple Diffusion isn’t setup that way. Some random person on the internet spent some time to package it up nicely and in exchange they hit #1 on HN. Possibly more than once!

https://xkcd.com/1987/

My easy method to make such a self-contained environment:

- download the Python embedded environment,

- modify `pythonXX.pth` to `import site`,

- install pip in the environment,

- install all dependencies with pip,

- install your code as an executable module (with a `__main__.py` file).

You can ship this as a ZIP file and simply run `./python.exe -m your_module arg1 arg2 arg3...`