Most people who want MeshTerm have a radio and a terminal, not a Python
toolchain. This is the install for them: one file, download it, run it.
`packaging/meshterm.spec` freezes the app with PyInstaller in console mode —
which is not a detail, since a windowed build of a terminal program starts with
nowhere to draw and exits. The assets land at `meshterm/assets` inside the bundle
so that `Path(__file__).parent.parent / "assets"` keeps resolving exactly as it
does in a checkout, and bleak's per-platform backends are named as hidden imports
because nothing static ever sees the one that actually gets used. UPX is off: a
few megabytes are not worth being flagged by antivirus on a first release.
The build was run here rather than only written. The Windows executable comes out
at 14 MB, runs from a directory with no source tree in sight, and draws the
specimen card — which is the real test, because the specimen reads the asset
files.
`installers.yml` does the same on five machines, because frozen builds cannot be
cross-compiled. Windows, macOS on both Apple silicon and Intel (plenty of people
still have one, and an arm64 build will not run for them), and Linux on x64 and
ARM64 — the last for the uConsole. Each leg runs the binary from a temporary
directory before uploading it, so a build that only works beside its own source
fails on the runner instead of on somebody's laptop, and each one gets a checksum
written beside it. It publishes nothing; attaching these to a release stays a
separate decision.
Also here: `meshterm --help` now opens with the same sentence as the package
summary, rather than a fourth description of the project written in its own way.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5
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