The future (was: [Pythonmac-SIG] FAQ item)

[Jack Jansen]

On dinsdag, jul 29, 2003, at 21:29 Europe/Amsterdam, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> What about the bootstrap problem (Package Manager vs. PyObjC)?
>
> You planning to make PyObjC one of MacPython 2.4's "batteries" ?

Ow, okay, why not start this discussion right away.

If everything happens as planned with Panther and Python 2.3 we are in 
an interesting situation: Apple will have forced the split between 
MacPython-the-engine and MacPython-the-tools. This means there will in 
effect be 2 MacPython distributions: a complete one for 10.2 and a 
tools-only (plus the waste module) for 10.3.

This suddenly makes it a lot easier to replace the tools with a newer 
set of tools, even before 2.4 comes out, or OSX 10.4, or whatever.

And it turns out this is actually true for a lot of the things I would 
like to get
done when 2.3 is out of the way: Bob's new OSA interface and something 
either based on
or similar to Bill Fancher's Python OSA component are two that spring 
to mind.
[BTW: is there anyone here who knows Bill personally? If so: please 
contact me]

I'm rather happy with the engine part as it is, there's some 
repackaging to be
done (CoreFoundation and QuickTime should move out of Carbon, all three
should be generated from OSX-native headers in stead of old Universal 
Headers,
maybe the submodules of Carbon should become transparent, that sort of 
things),
but I'm pretty delighted with the current state of things.

So this means 2.4 would simply become a point in time at which we 
incorporate
all the new tools and functionality into a single installer, deprecate 
the old
functionality and kill the old tools.
--
- Jack Jansen        <Jack.Jansen at oratrix.com>        
http://www.cwi.nl/~jack -
- If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman -