[Mailman-Users] [Mailman-Developers] OS X & Mailman & Python

[Larry Stone]

On 9/28/06 9:16 PM, Barry Warsaw at barry at python.org wrote:

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> On Sep 28, 2006, at 8:45 PM, Larry Stone wrote:
> 
>> This all made me curious. I'm just a user of Mailman on Mac OS X - no
>> development of any sort by me - so I'm good with 2.1.9 and Python
>> 2.3.5 on
>> 10.4.7 - but this topic made me look at the Python 2.5 package at
>> python.org. I finally figured out that the MacOS X python installer
>> installs
>> a new version in /usr/local/bin (as well as other places) separate
>> from the
>> Tiger provided version in /usr/bin. But how would you get mailman
>> to use the
>> user installed version? mailmanctl has #! /usr/bin/python at the
>> top which
>> will send it to the Tiger provided version. Of course you could modify
>> mailmanctl but that would be subject to being overwritten when a
>> new version
>> of mailman is installed. Or is that the way it would need to be done?
> 
> I'm assuming you built Mailman from source.  If so, run configure
> with --with-python=/usr/local/bin/python or put that python on your
> $PATH first, and Mailman will use that one.

Yes, from source (I'm on MacOS X client, not server, so no pre-installed
brain-dead mailman! :-) )

> If you look at the source, you'll see that the #! line is actually
> @PYTHON@ which gets substituted by configure at build time.  I forget
> exactly why, but the standard #! /usr/bin/env python invocation
> caused problems for people, so now we hardcode it via configure.

Thanks. Someone else pointed out the --with-python to me privately. I wasn't
sure what you meant about $PATH at first since of course my $PATH doesn't
mean anything when mailman is started at system startup but now I see it's
the value of $PATH when configure is run that you mean as configure finds
the first python $PATH takes it to and uses that.

As I said, not really an issue for me right now but this has made a huge
difference in my understanding of how the whole mailman build process works
so quite valuable in that sense.

So, that leads to the question, is there any reason to install python 2.5
while running 2.1.9 or are we fine with 2.3.5 if we aren't doing anything
else that would benefit from 2.5?

-- 
Larry Stone
lstone19 at stonejongleux.com
http://www.stonejongleux.com/