<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On 19-Aug-2008, at 19:28 , Bill Janssen wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">My understanding is that if there is a system Python, you shouldn't <br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite">change it. Ever.<br></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">Huge, big, honkin' +1 from me on that. Besides, for a system Python, <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">you want your distribution to manage packages, not setuptools, <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">otherwise you confuse -- and probably break -- your system.<br></blockquote><br>I find this discussion fascinating. I install new packages into my<br>system Python all the time, with "/usr/bin/python setup.py install",<br>and that includes setuptools. I've got PIL, ReportLab, Twisted, Xlib,<br>appscript, docutils, email-4.0.1, fuse, PyLucene, medusa, mutagen,<br>roman, setuptools, and SSL installed in the Leopard machine I'm<br>writing from. They don't wind up in<br>/System/Library/.../site-packages/, they wind up in<br>/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/, which is sort of the right place,<br>from an Apple point of view. I do this on lots of Macs -- I've got a<br>regular posse of them at work. And I've never had any problems with<br>it.<br></div></blockquote></div><br><div>Same here: if have yet to see adverse consequences of installing third party packages into system Python. And now that Apple is distributing fairly current versions of things like PyObjC there's even little reason to build my own copy of Python. I have one on disk, but I find that I use the system Python for almost everything.</div><br>Fink (and to a lesser extent MacPorts) I don't touch with a 10 feet pole: too often I've created software for distribution only to find that it somehow, behind my back, was linked against a dynamic library that I had installed locally through it.<br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">--</font></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>, <a href="http://www.cwi.nl/~jack">http://www.cwi.nl/~jack</a></font></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman</font></p> <br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div> </div><br></body></html>