[Pythonmac-SIG] Progress report: unix python on Mac OS X

Russell E Owen owen@astro.washington.edu
Thu, 10 Jan 2002 14:52:26 -0800


At 10:58 PM +0100 1/10/02, Jack Jansen wrote:
>I can answer only one:
>
>> Also, amusingly enough, fink now has python 2.2 binary available, supposedly
>> with all optional packages built. Unfortunately, it requires "gmp", which fin
>> k doesn't have available (nor do I know what it is; I suppose it might even b
>> e a misspelling of some other package, such as "gimp").
>
>I think this is the GNU Multiple Precision library or some such. It's
>probably used for encryption modules or some such.

You were right, thanks! It turns out fink can find it using "fink install gmp". I'm not sure why it didn't show up in the list of known source or binary packages. Anyway, installing it allowed the full python 2.2 installation to proceed and it works fine.

One quirk is that "inf' and "nan" do not work. On MacPython and Solaris (Python versions 2.1.1) you can do things like:
>>>a =  float("NaN")
>>>a
nan
and use that value in comparisons and such. On the unix installation of Python 2.2 on Mac OS X float("NaN") raises an exception. Oh well...IEEE handling has never been claimed to work in Python, though I hope that will change someday.

So far everything seems to work great (except my x server, and I'm working on that).

Much thanks to Jack Jansen and all others who made the unix version of Python compatible with Mac OS X! If you go this route, consider upgrading to BBEdit 6.5, since it allows one to run Python scripts from the editor. (I'm hoping Pepper eventually gets there, as well.)

Regards,

-- Russell

P.S. fink selfupdate fails (in version 0.3.1) due to a minor bug in a perl script; if you run into this, I'll be happy to send you the fix.