[Chicago] Python on macs

[Joseph Kocherhans]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Tim Head <betatim at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I acquired a mac yesterday and want to install python ;))
>
> While I could just download it from python.org I could be more complicated ...
>
> I remember reading a blog post several months (or even years??) back
> by someone explaining how he had come up with this clever way of
> having multiple versions of python installed in parallel, without ever
> interfering with the python installed by mac and using virtualenv to
> keep the installed packages nice and tidy and make it super easy to
> create quickly a brandnew sandboed python.
>
> Sounds like the holy land? Yes if only I could remember enough details
> to actually find this post again :((
>
> Does anyone on the list have an idea what I am talking about and could
> point me in the right direction or directly give some advice on python
> on mac?

If you're on Snow Leopard, I don't think you can do this without
patching. Python 2.3 and 2.4 won't build out of the box. Not sure
about 10.5... I just use the system's python 2.6.

> ps. I come from gentoo and am already badly missing portage, are
> macports and fink really the best mac can do on that front?

I'd recommend homebrew instead of macports or fink [1]. It's still
sort of early in the project, but it's completely replaced macports
and by-hand-source-installation for me. Nothing on the mac is going to
come close to portage. If it gets too frustrating, I'd recommend
installing gentoo as a headless vm under VMWare Fusion. I do that with
debian occasionally.

Joseph

[1] http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew