[Distutils] 2 platforms down, only Mac to go...

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 03:32 PM 01/16/2006 -0800, Bob Ippolito wrote:

>On Jan 16, 2006, at 3:21 PM, Michael Twomey wrote:
>
>>On 14/01/06, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>I wonder, though, if perhaps what's happening in the configuration
>>>that
>>>currently works, is that the path is being interpreted as "bundle
>>>relative"
>>>to the extension.  This is fine and is really what we want, but
>>>I'm not
>>>sure that it can be done with older Mac OSes.  I seem to recall that
>>>bundle-relative linking was added in 10.4?  Or was it 10.3?  I
>>>need to
>>>start actually *using* a Mac one of these days.  :)
>>
>>I think it was in 10.3 (the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET affects this),
>>I'm pretty sure it was the "-undefined dynamic_lookup" which got
>>introduced, which had a big impact on shared libraries in bundles. I'm
>>not sure how this would affect the linking stuff above, it is "used to
>>allow any undefined symbols to be looked up dynamically at runtime"
>>according to the man page.
>
>You are correct, MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3 allows you to use - 
>undefined dynamic_lookup.  However, requiring Mac OS X 10.4 would
>allow you to use @loader_path [1], which would let you skip out on
>the chdir hack.
>
>[1] http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/DeveloperTools/dyld.html

So, should setuptools maybe check the deployment target and use that to 
decide whether to chdir-hack or to use -install_name 
@loader_path/blah.dylib?  That won't make the current platform tests and 
build customization any more complex on a fundamental level.  I already 
have to decide whether to use a chdir loader (not needed at all on Windows) 
and whether the loader should use dl (Linux) or not (Mac).  So, adding an 
environment variable check doesn't sound like a big deal.

Do any OS X versions prior to 10.3 even have Python installed, btw?  I'm 
figuring I can live with not supporting those, though I should double-check 
what OSAF is targeting, of course.