[Pythonmac-SIG] Main Python on Mac version?

[Roger Binns]

> Apple's upgrade policy seems to be one of urgency rather than  
> convenience.  If there were gnarly security issues in Python, I'm sure  
> we'd have seen an upgrade.  There's an upgrade around the corner called  
> Tiger (10.4), which will ship with a more recent version of Python.   
> Which version this is, I can't say, but the public WWDC 2004 sources  
> had 2.3.3 if I'm not mistaken.

The issue is that I am not doing stuff for just myself.  Any other
Mac BitPim developers have to use the same version of Python and
the same extensions.  I also try as much as possible to use
binary installations that are in as wide a usage as possible.
That helps ensure that any bugs are found. 

Anything you build yourself or is used by a small number of people
can have issues.  For example when I built wxPython on a Redhat
box it used SDL because it happened to be installed.  When I then
redistributed BitPim binaries, things failed to run on some
people's machines.
 
> There are some bugfixes that would be nice, but it's dangerous to do  
> that because you end up with some people that have a fast datetime  
> module and some people with a slow datetime module, or some people with  
> a plistlib that works with dates, and other people without.

That is why I stay "mainstream".  The problem now is that BitPim
on Mac is using 2.3.0, yet 2.3.4 on Windows and Linux.  I presume
the various bug fixes in 2.3.[1-5] were serious enough to warrant
new releases, otherwise why did they bother making them.

> If you want an application that is 10.2 compatible, 

The way I deal with OS version compatibility is to just build on 
whatever the version is.  I never try and build on a newer version
and hope it will work on older versions.  That mythical virtualisation
software would be very handy for this.

> There's a good chance system-python-dependent applications built on 10.3 will  
> work on 10.4, but there's probably not a good chance that such  
> applications will work on later versions of Mac OS X (if, for example,  
> Python 2.4 becomes the default and 2.3 goes away).

And that is how we end up building for different MacOS versions.

When we switch to Python 2.4, it will be required for all supported
operating systems and their versions.  Presumably we'll still be
supporting 10.3 then so I'll have to figure out how to deal with
that.

Roger