In article
Speaking of an OS X installer for 3.0.1, over the last few weeks I have been working on tidying up the OS X installer build process. While the basic OS X build/installer process is good, some cruft has accumulated over the past years and a number of mostly minor issues arose due to the 3.x split. IMO, the most important issues were with IDLE and, thanks to Ronald, we did get the most important fixes for OS X IDLE checked-in in time for 3.0.1; they are also in py3k and will be going into trunk and 26. I have a few other fixes that apply just to the OSX build/installer parts which did not get submitted in time for the 3.0.1 cutoff but which are ready to go for 3.x and 2.x. Basically they fix some version number updating and ensure that the installer image will be built reproducibly in a clean environment so there is no contamination of the installer images. Currently, that's easy to do as happened with the first round of the OS X 2.6 installer (e.g. with a locally installed Tcl/Tk).
I want to follow up on this a bit. In the past if the Mac Python installer was built on a machine that did NOT have a locally installed Tcl/Tk then it would fail to work with a locally installed Tcl/Tk: Python would segfault when trying to use Tkinter. The solution was to build the Mac python installer on a machine with a locally installed Tcl/Tk. The resulting installer package would work on all systems -- with or without locally installed Tcl/Tk. So...has this problem been worked around, or is the Mac installer still built on a machine that has a locally installed Tcl/Tk? I haven't run Python 2.6 yet because there is no release of numpy that is compatible. I did try upgrading from 2.5.2 to 2.5.4 and got a segfault when trying to display images using PIL and Tkinter; I have not had time to try to track that down, so I've just reverted for now. Most people who makes serious use of Tkinter presumably have a locally installed Tcl/Tk because the version that Apple provides is ancient and is missing many important bug fixes and performance enhancements. Also, a somewhat related issue: Tcl/Tk 8.4 is no longer maintained. All development work is going on in Tcl/Tk 8.5. Presumably Apple will transition one of these days, and at that point we may need a separate Mac Python installer for the older operating systems vs. the newer. -- Rusell