On Tue, 28 Jan 2003 15:15:00 -0800 (PST), Cory Dodt <corydodt@yahoo.com> wrote:
Not really . . . but _I_ do, and you have my ear.
This is great. As those who subscribe to my personal list no doubt know, I have some frustration with apple, and some of this is due to the difficulty I've had trying to get in contact with people "on the inside" through traditional channels. Hopefully your sales contact will be a bit more forthcoming than support@apple.com! :-)
If you could ask Apple to change stuff which would make your life easier as a Python developer, what would you ask?
Purely as a Python software developer, Bob Ippolito's comments are spot-on. I don't know why they've been missing this, since it seems the whole python/mac community feels this way. For emphasis, I will repeat the most salient points here: On Tue, 28 Jan 2003 19:05:45 -0500, Bob Ippolito <bob@redivi.com> wrote:
What Apple needs to do, for god's sake, is allow Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com> to maintain the Python build in darwin and OS X proper. Or at least consult with him before releasing something.
Apple er.. screwed up a lot of ./configure options when building the 2.2 build that ships with OS X. If the thing was built properly it'd be ready to do full GUI applications (Modules to interface with CoreFoundation, Carbon, etc), it even builds a GUI application launcher *and* an IDE!
I'd like to add to this that Python support included in Apple's dist of ProjectBuilder, even if it were something as trivial as syntax highlighting, would really be a nice thing. Back to your comments:
The product is being built on a foundation of pyopenssl, cog, pybsddb, pycrypto, and twisted. Are any of these less than perfect on a Mac? Are there specific ways Apple can help make this situation better?
Twisted? Less than perfect? Of COURSE not! Unless of course imperfection means I can milk this opportunity for HUGE CASH PAYOFFS, in which case yes, it's full of problems, I'll just, ahem, come up with some. Seriously, the biggest problem with Twisted on the mac is that we're still very much living in a Unix mindset, and we have no platform-idiomatic tools for either development or deploying applications on OS X. I'm upset that I haven't had enough time to work on Twisted as a platform (porting an application to a platform like OS X ought to be a complete no-brainer, but it clearly isn't!), and if Apple were willing to throw some resources my way I might build the Cocoa front-end to COIL before rewriting the web one. I'd sure like to have an excuse, especially a paid excuse, to write apps using IB. This is really more on the level of making my life more fun, and *Apple's* life "easier". I think that an integrated, GUI-friendly Twisted dist on MacOS would be an awesome server-side compliment to Safari, possibly a killer app, but that opinion may not be shared by Apple's higher-ups; this is a pipe dream. (Folks from other platforms: to be clear, I'm not really interested in including *exclusive* functionality for the mac, but I wouldn't mind building it *enhanced* for the mac and building TTW interfaces after the fact.)
I'll take the best suggestions and bring them to light when I have my conversation. Thanks for any help!
I hope that this is relevant :-).
Just a list of things I plan to ask for anyway (in no particular order):
It's expensive to develop apps for the mac, because it's expensive to own and maintain a mac. I think that almost all the Twisted developers could use some support in these areas. The most deserving developers in this regard are Donovan Preston and Bob Ippolito, both Mac users who are already developing Twisted apps on that platform. However, they may be among those requiring the least assistance ;-)
* hardware
I've got a way-too-damn-expensive Power Macintosh that I haven't had the opportunity to use for much MacOS stuff because it's running Linux most of the time (due to aforementioned lacks in the Apple dev. env.). Obviously, more hardware from Apple is better! I would especially like a 14-inch powerbook to replace my x86 laptop. However, even given my existing Apple hardware, I'm unlikely to spend any of my own time volunteering to enhance Apple's operating system with Twisted if I have to keep shelling out $129.95 every few months for the privilege. I would really appreciate a no-cost license to Apple's software offerings, or at least enough of them to do GUI application development with Twisted.
* money
Since I'm not paying rent on a credit card yet :-), either this or hardware might convince me to spend some time on a Mac-specific project to enhance Twisted. Honestly, for your application, I doubt that this is a priority. It is something I've thought Apple might be interested in for a while, but I haven't had the cognitive bandwidth to get enough accomplished to attract Apple's attention about it.
* engineers to fix Mac-related bugs in Twisted (or other dependencies) directly ... the list could provide me with a log of a run of trial to help here
As far as I know, we really do have relatively few of these. As Mr. Ippolito said, the system works fine as is and several people use their Macs to write Twisted code.