[Pythonmac-SIG] MacPython 2.3 - Carbon only?

[Mark Day]

On Thursday, January 3, 2002, at 02:46 PM, Jack Jansen wrote:

> Folks,
> I'm toying with the idea of making MacPython 2.3 Carbon-only, as this
> would save a lot of development effort. And there are a lot of things
> I'd like to do, for one thing I would like all our MacPython goodies
> to run natively in MachoPython by the time 2.3 is released.

If making MacPython Carbon-only increases the chances of integrating 
MacPython and MachoPython, then I'm all for it.  I'd really like to see 
Python be able to take advantage of both traditional Mac (Carbon) and 
Unix (simultaneously) on a Mac OS X system.

> 1. MacPython wouldn't run on 8.5 anymore (for 8.1 MacPython 2.2 is the
> last release anyway), and on 8.6 you would need to manually install
> CarbonLib.

In legacy installations, I think 8.6 is good enough these days.  If the 
minimum requirement was 9.x, that might be a bit more of a problem 
(given the increased hardware demands of 9.x).  There isn't a lot of 
difference in the requirements between 8.5 and 8.6.  But I don't know 
how much the requirements change because of CarbonLib (eg., additional 
RAM usage).

In my wife's store, the machines all run 8.6.  That's mostly because 8.6 
has a smaller RAM footprint, and those old machines are a pain to 
upgrade.  I think a Carbon-only MacPython would be fine.  They *could* 
be upgraded to 9.x if I really needed to.  But it sounds like can put 
off that kind of decision until sometime after MacPython 2.3 (at which 
point I may have upgraded to newer machines anyway).

For my own personal tinkering and general productivity enhancement, I 
already run the latest Mac OS 9 and X anyway.

-Mark