On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 10:59 PM, Michael Foord <fuzzyman@voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
Should any of this also apply to Mac OS X and Windows?
Any platform that considers itself "unix-like" in this context can decide to follow it, we aren't fussy (e.g. Cygwin and the *nix-y aspects of OS X). The main point of the PEP is to get a consensus recommendation out of python-dev as to the best way forward (and I think Kerrick did a good job of summarising the position that has been expressed in this thread). More generally, Windows and Mac OS X developers seem to be happier with the idea of bundling a Python interpreter inside the application than traditional *nix style platforms. This is a PITA for the system maintainer when it comes time to handle security vulnerabilites, but certainly more convenient when upgrading the default Python install.
Note that we *do* have alternative distributors [1] of Python for these platforms who may wish to follow any recommendations we have for 2.7, even if we don't modify those installers for our own distributions.
The really tricky part on Windows is handling file associations. I think we're just doomed on that front, unless we want to start supporting separate .py2 and .py3 extensions (and adding *that* in a maintenance release would be a far cry from just adding another symlink). The lack of near-universal symlink support on Windows filesystems is also an issue - we would have to duplicate files like python.exe and pythonw.exe on non-NTFS filesystems in order to provide them under alternative names. For *nix, I think there is a simple way forward that is an improvement over where things stand now. For Windows, I don't think we can do much better than the status quo and for Mac OS X... I think Apple will do whatever Apple feel like doing :) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia