[issue11079] Make OS X entry in Applications like that in Windows

[Ned Deily]

Ned Deily <nad at acm.org> added the comment:

I agree that adding a link to the installed documentation set would be an improvement.  Currently, the only easy way to find it is within IDLE:  Help -> Python Docs (or F1).  I'll propose an installer patch for that for 3.2.

-0.5 for removing the Extras directory.  Prior to Python 3.2, it contained the contents of the Demo directory.  For 3.2, the Demo directory was pruned and relocated to Tools, which had not previously been installed anywhere by OS X installers.  Also, there has been at least one request to make some of the contents of Tools available on OS X, i.e. unittestgui.  For those reasons, I added Tools under Extras for 3.2.  I agree that much of the contents is not particularly useful from, say, IDLE.  But the Python Launcher will run them under a command line and users can easily drag/drop any of onto a python command line in a terminal shell or just cd there and can also use the Finder's Get Info to change the application associated with them.  That said, the launching of Python scripts in OS X is currently is currently somewhat fragile and unintuitive (in the presence of multiple Python versions) and in need of some work post-3.2; see, for instance, Issue5262.  Due to OS X's multiple personalities and interaction styles (Classic Mac, command line UNIX, X-based apps, etc), it's also difficult to assess exactly how the python.org installed Pythons are being used on OS X. My guess, though, is that a majority of our users these days primarily or exclusively use Python from a command line so it would be good to not neglect their needs.

The issue of uninstalling has come up before, most recently (IIRC) in Issue7107.  Unfortunately, the Mac/README file updated there is not installed.  I would be +0.5 at looking into it further as time permits while recognizing that there would need to be caveats like potentially wiping out installed system-wide site-packages.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue11079>
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