[Chicago] MacBook Pro

[swg]

Ted Pollari wrote:
> On Nov 12, 2007, at 9:36 AM, swg wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm guessing folks here don't have this problem (since everyone is a
>> python hacker and there seem to be a fair number of Apple Notebooks at
>> meetings), but most folks I know (including myself) have a real hard
>> time getting extra modules and anything that's not OOTB installed and
>> working on OS X.
>>     
>
>
> Really?  Despite how much I b.s. on list, I don't consider myself a  
> real hardcore python hacker (though I guess I'd say I'm a pretty  
> savvy OS X user/admin) and I haven't really had any major issues with  
> Python and OS X.  What sort of issues have you run into?
>
>   
Well, a lot of times it comes down to stuff with C libraries.  We use 
Python a lot to connect to SOAP stuff, so SOAPpy is always the first 
thing we run in to, which requires tracking down that floating point 
library and so on and so forth.   This usually leads to the person 
realizing gcc isn't installed and then we spend a good portion of time 
trying to track down the OS X CD that came with the machine, etc etc. 

Also, the ActiveState thing where they couldn't (or still can't) use the 
gnu readline for the Python terminal always sucked up an hour or two of 
the day to get working.  After this, and several more cases of trying to 
track down C libraries, I just stopped doing Python stuff on OS X ( I 
usually use Linux anyways, if I used OS X for more than testing Safari, 
I probably would have put more time into it )

I mean, it's not a huge deal, but it's the difference between spending 
an hour or two, or a couple minutes.  It's a little ironic, since when I 
was in college I thought using Linux was cool because you had to compile 
everything, and now I use it mostly out of sheer laziness since typing 
apt-get is so easy and has yet to give me any problems.  We try fink 
occasionally, but it always seem to give us some type of problem.

-Steve

( Hopefully I put enough Python stuff in this message for the list, I'm 
*honestly* not trying to start on OS debate  :)    )