Decide on future of standalone packages

[nchammas]

Since the release of Apple Silicon-based Macs, building standalone packages for macOS has gotten harder due to two issues:

1. To support both x86 and arm64 architectures, PyInstaller packages need to be built against the universal2 target architecture. This in turn requires that Python and all the libraries you run PyInstaller on are "fat" binaries that include support for both architectures. Homebrew-installed Python doesn't include fat binaries, and my machine isn't currently setup for this. I don't know how easy it would be to changes things around to get this working. But that's not the only issue.

2. macOS now requires binary code signing of apps. Otherwise, trying to run Flintrock will give an error along these lines:

   "Flintrock" can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.

   As with the architecture issue, it may or may not be easy to solve this problem. I don't know.

Is it worth solving these problems? I'm not sure.

Python is extremely popular for building command-line tools like Flintrock. Anyone using AWS or Databricks is likely already using the AWS or Databricks CLIs, both of which are written in Python and distributed exclusively via PyPI. Those projects don't offer standalone packages.

For macOS, we also have a community-maintained Homebrew formula for Flintrock, which takes care of installing Python for you.

I see that there are some downloads of Flintrock's standalone packages from GitHub, but perhaps not enough to justify investing in solving the above problems.

I think sticking to normal Python packages for distribution makes the most sense for Flintrock at this point. I'm open to hearing otherwise if any users would like to chime in.

[sfcoy]

From my point of view as a (very) long-term Mac user, I have never used the standalone installer.
I install Python by using the package installer that can be downloaded from python.org.
I never use brew.
I just used pip3 install --upgrade flintrock to get the most recent update.