[Pythonmac-SIG] Help: fink python broken after 10.2 upgrade

[Jack Jansen]

On vrijdag, september 13, 2002, at 06:23 , Russell E Owen wrote:
> I upgraded to 10.2 yesterday (including the developer tools) and now
> my Python (the current fink binary, version 2.2) is broken. When I
> start it I see:
> /sw/bin/python
> Python 2.2 (#1, Apr 17 2002, 16:11:12)
> [GCC 2.95.2 19991024 (release)] on darwin
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> dyld: /sw/bin/python Undefined symbols:
> /sw/lib/libreadline.4.2.dylib undefined reference to _tgetent
> expected to be defined in /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
> Trace/BPT trap

This is the Jaguar problem I've seen the most complaints about. 
Up to 10.1.5 Apple shipped a very old curses implementation and 
had it right in libSystem. Since 10.2 Apple ships a much more 
decent ncurses, but it lives in a separate shared library.

And what bothers me is that the framework versioning would have 
allowed them to ship a compatibility version of libSystem, but 
apparently they didn't consider it worth it. If every upgrade 
from 10.N to 10.(N+1) is going to break a lot of innocent 
software Apple is moving away from the brilliant backward 
compatibility they had in OS7-8-9 (99.9% of your software 
survived an upgrade). Add to that the fact that I don't think 
it's possible on 10.2 to create a binary that will run on 10.1 
also (or is there a way to do this? Please enlighten me), and it 
seems we're up the same creek that Windows users are, that OS 
upgrades are a dangerous thing not to be undertaken lightly.
--
- Jack Jansen        <Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com>        
http://www.cwi.nl/~jack -
- If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- 
Emma Goldman -