Hi, On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 12:14 PM, Russell E. Owen <rowen@uw.edu> wrote:
In article <CABL7CQjaCXp2GrtT8HVmaYAjRm0xmtn1Qt71WKdnbGq7dLU0cQ@mail.gmail.com>, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
Building binaries for releases is currently quite complex and time-consuming. For OS X we need two different machines, because we still provide binaries for OS X 10.5 and PPC machines. I propose to not do this anymore. It doesn't mean we completely drop support for 10.5 and PPC, just that we don't produce binaries. PPC was phased out in 2006 and OS X 10.6 came out in 2009, so there can't be a lot of demand for it (and the download stats at http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/files/NumPy/1.7.1/confirm this).
Furthermore I propose to not provide 2.6 binaries anymore. Downloads of 2.6 OS X binaries were <5% of the 2.7 ones. We did the same with 2.4 for a long time - support it but no binaries.
So what we'd have left at the moment is only the 64-bit/32-bit universal binary for 10.6 and up. What we finally need to add is 3.x OS X binaries. We can make an attempt to build these on 10.8 - since we have access to a hosted 10.8 Mac Mini it would allow all devs to easily do a release (leaving aside the Windows issue). If anyone has tried the 10.6 SDK on 10.8 and knows if it actually works, that would be helpful.
Any concerns, objections?
I am in strong agreement.
I'll be interested to learn how you make binary installers for python 3.x because the standard version of bdist_mpkg will not do it. I have heard of two other projects (forks or variants of bdist_mpkg) that will, but I have no idea of either is supported.
I think I'm the owner of one of the forks; I supporting it, but I should certainly make a release soon too.
I have been able to building packages on 10.8 using MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 that will run on 10.6, so it will probably work. However I have run into several odd problems over the years building a binary installer on a newer system only to find it won't work on older systems for various reasons. Thus my personal recommendation is that you build on 10.6 if you want an installer that reliably works for 10.6 and later. I keep an older computer around for this reason. In fact that is one good reason to drop support for ancient operating systems and PPC.
I'm sitting next to a 10.6 machine you are welcome to use; just let me know, I'll give you login access. Cheers, Matthew