[Pythonmac-SIG] Optional BSD package is required for (useable)
Python?
Tom Pollard
mlpollard at earthlink.net
Tue May 11 16:51:33 EDT 2004
On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 04:18:31PM -0400, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>> I really don't think it's a big deal to simply tell the naive users
>> who
>> go out of their way to deselect the BSD layer that they screwed up and
>> now they have to install it if they want to use your software. It's
>> not that hard to determine the presence of the BSD layer.
I think this condescending language about users "screwing up" their
MacOS X installation by leaving out the BSD subsystem is a little bit
bizarre and unprofessional. If it's an optional install, then Apple
clearly disagrees with that point of view (as do I).
On May 11, 2004, at 4:26 PM, Nicholas Riley wrote:
> So why can't packaged apps use the bundle Python too? From some of
> the other emails I got the idea that Python was unusable without the
> BSD layer installed,
There's a python startup script in the package created by
bundle-builder that sets a couple of environment variables and invokes
python to run the bundled script. It is solely in order to run this
script that the BSD environment needs to be installed. It could easily
be replaced with a /bin/sh script if it was considered important to
support users who didn't have /usr/bin/python installed already.
That's the only change that would be required.
The last time I brought this up, Bob Ippolito explained that this would
make it impossible to use the bundled app as a "regular" app from both
the Finder and the command line, but I never really appreciated that
point. It sounded like bundle-builder2 would eliminate the problem in
a more robust way, so it didn't seem worth pursuing. But, if I was
going to ship an app based on the current bundle-builder, I would
definitely hack it to use a shell startup script instead of the python
script.
Tom Pollard
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