[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: Changing things in /System (was: Tkinter on Panther?)

Russell E Owen owen at astro.washington.edu
Tue Dec 23 17:18:43 EST 2003


>On Dec 23, 2003, at 19:58, Russell E. Owen wrote:
>>Jack said something similar when I asked about updating Python on
>>Panther. But...why? I would expect the OS to see the new version in
>>/Library/Frameworks and life to be good. Apparently my expectation is
>>false.
>
>The party line is "you shall not change anything in /System because Apple
>controls it". In actual fact that chance of adverse consequences aren't all
>that big if you are careful. If you replace Python 2.3 by Python 2.3.3 using
>the exact same build procedure Apple used (get it from the darwin CVS
>repository) the chance of you breaking anything for Apple is as good as zero.
>Apple could still break things for you, though, if they installed 
>stuff over yours.
>If you replace Python 2.3 with Python 2.3.3 using the normal (python source
>distribution) build procedure the chances of breaking anything are still slim.
>The chance of breaking things gets quite a bit bigger if you remove 
>Apple-installed
>Python, though. For one thing, Apple could decide to use python in a future
>installer (they did this with Perl for a quicktime installer, and 
>people who had "upgraded" their perl in-place were seriously bitten).

Thank you. I am afraid I am still a bit confused, however.

I think you are suggesting I install a new framework Python and let 
it coexist with Apple's framework Python. That's great if true. I 
really want some of the fixes in Python 2.3.x.

But I thought you led a recent discussion on this mailing list saying 
this did not work (and was not likely to work until Python 2.4) -- 
that there was some problem with distutils, that modules installed in 
the user's Python would cause trouble because they'd link to Apple's 
Python.

I am clearly misunderstanding something, but what?

-- Russell

P.S. I finally got an X11 python 2.3.3 installed. Bit of a struggle. 
It kept linking to my framework tcl instead of my x11 tcl. I finally 
trashed my framework tcl/tk and rebuilt everything from scratch and 
that did the trick. It's working beautifully, and Apple seems to have 
fixed some of the bugs in X11 (window height could be odd at times). 
Hallelujah!



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