[Python-3000] plat-mac seriously broken?

[Bill Janssen]

> if you need Carbon, you stick with
> 2.x, otherwise Py3K is requiring you modernize your Mac code and move
> to Cocoa and PyObjC.

Brett,

It's not just Carbon and Cocoa, which are primarily different bindings
for developing Apple-style "applications", and primarily in my mind
for GUI functionality (well, more than that, but primarily that --
QuickDraw vs. NeXTStep).  There's a lot of really nifty non-GUI stuff
on the Mac (heck, I do everything with X11 and GNU Emacs), and Python
works particularly well there because it has bindings to some of that
functionality.  Those system libraries are largely C/C++ based,
particularly in BSD userland, and seem to have differing levels of
Objective-C wrappers.  But these wrappers don't seem to typically
provide the same functionality that the C API does, particularly for
Core Foundation, which is a collection of C APIs.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreFoundation/index.html

The "plat-mac" stuff is a mix of GUI and "application" things, which I
agree have been largely superseded by PyObjC, and "internals" things,
which have not.  So it needs some sorting.  Maybe on the Mac-SIG
mailing list?  Maybe send out a message there saying, "We intend to
jettison plat-mac for Python 3K because PyObjC makes it unnecessary",
and see if anyone objects.

Personally, I think it makes sense to replace the existing
undocumented plat-mac non-GUI modules with documented ctypes-based
modules.

I don't develop Apple-style applications (or at least, not in C or
Objective-C), thus I don't use either Carbon or Cocoa much, so others
may have more information on this.

Bill