On 11/1/07, Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.com> wrote:

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It's not entirely silly. This has been the advice given to app developers on this list and the PyObjC list for years now. It's nice to have a better system Python for quick scripts, but it's still the System Python. It's Apples, for their stuff that uses Python. And it is specific to OS 10.5. If you use it to build your app, your app is pretty much guaranteed not to work when someone tries to run it on 10.6, etc.

At some level I agree - I haven't used the system python on Tiger for a long time now. But, that is not how Apple "sells" the python on their system.

This is really interesting. For my apps, I use the system Python on Tiger, and expect to do it again with Leopard. If I have to have a specific version of an extension that's needed, I make sure the directory where I keep it is on the sys.path of my application before the standard directories. That seems to be about all that's required. I'm not sure what all the FUD about the system Python is...

There is little fear, uncertainty or doubt about this. The problem is that this represents a huge change of behavior for users making the transition to Leopard. On Tiger, a user could download any basically any python pacakge and do "python setup.py install" and things would work. Now under Leopard, this becomes "python setup.py install" + muck with PYTHONPATH or .pth files. I personally have no problem doing this, but many of the casual python users with whom I work will be tripped up by this....and they will come and ask me what to do....over and over again.... Brian