Fw: [Pythonmac-SIG] Versions, Frameworks, Linking, PantherPythonFix

[Roger Binns]

>> Taking a step back, am I the only person who thinks the Python situation
>> on Mac is absolutely ridiculous, although 10.2 looks better than 10.3.
> 
> As Bob says, you obviously haven't used 10.2...
 
Correct.  I don't want to disparage the improvements that have been made,
but the situation as it stands right now on Mac still seems really
bad to me.

Compare to Windows:

 http://www.python.org/2.3.5/

On Windows you just run the installer and all is fine.  You can
run the installer for as many versions as you want.  Most extensions
are distributed as installers as well.  You just run them, they
give you a list of installed compatible versions and where they
are installed.  You choose and all is fine.  Uninstall can be
done from the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs menu.

The instructions on that page also cover all the other UNIXen
which work fine with the tar/configure/make/make install and
correctly deal with with having multiple concurrent versions.

Mac isn't even mentioned on that page.  The tar/configure/make/make
install stuff does work.  (I can't tell if it enables frameworks
by default or not - wxPython requires a framework build, so I
enabled it).

But when installing extensions such as wxPython that come with
a graphical installer (yay!), they don't list the known Pythons
on the system.

It is so close to being simple and friendly :-)

> Don't you remember the days where Redhat came with Python 1.5.2 and if
> you upgraded that you broke redhat's tools?  Plus ca change, plus
> c'est la meme chose.
 
 Yup.  That hasn't been broken in years.  For example on Redhat 9 the
relevant Redhat tools use #!/usr/bin/python2.2

If you installed your own Python 2.2 it would end up under /usr/local
so this wouldn't clash nor would others unless you installed over
the main system one, in which case things will still be fine unless
you use different options (eg differently sized unicode characters).
 
> If you want your Python app to work in perpetuity, you'd better bundle
> a version of Python with it because one day OS X will presumably come
> with 2.4 or 2.5.  This strikes me as being the same as any other
> platform.
 
I already do bundle the interpretter on Windows and Linux.  For Mac the
system interpretter isn't bundled (for good reason) by py2app.  Others
can be, but then there stems issues like getting other packages to
install into them (eg wxPython).

Roger