[Pythonmac-SIG] [OT] To upgrade Mac OSX or not?

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jan 26, 2005, at 1:14 AM, Brian Lenihan wrote:


>
> On Jan 25, 2005, at 7:53 AM, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>
>>
>> This is probably a bit off-topic for this list, but is the only 
>> Mac-specific
>> mailing list I subscribe to, and Mac OSX versioning seems to affect
>> MacPython and many apps built with it.  I was prompted to write after 
>> seeing
>> Brian Lenihan's post about PySol for Mac OSX.  Visiting the page I 
>> saw "10.3
>> only".  *sigh* Yet another app I can't run on my laptop.
>
> I might be misremembering, but I thought Python on 10.2 was an 
> optional install.  I know 10.3 has Python 2.3.0 installed by default, 
> so that is what I built PySol with.   I have a stand-alone version 
> which uses Python 2.5, so it should work with whatever you installed 
> on 10.2, but I believe you need a framework build of Python.  Bob will 
> correct me if I am wrong.

A practically unusable version of Python 2.2.0 shipped with Mac OS X 
10.2.

If you built Python 2.5 on Mac OS X 10.3, it and anything you build for 
it (extensions, etc.) are not going to be compatible with Mac OS X 
10.2.  If you build the Python and all of its extensions on 10.2, then 
it will.  If you build a --semi-standalone PySol it will still bring in 
the third party extensions, so it's still nothing suitable for 10.2 
use.

> Bob is right: I know how to cross-compile using Apple's tool chain, 
> but I have no idea how to make a 10.2 compatible app bundle using 
> py2app and I have no interest in investing the time to find out how.

Well, it's hard enough to where I couldn't figure out how to actually 
build a Python on Mac OS X 10.3 that was compatible with 10.2, and I 
tried for the better part of a day, so take that as you will.  I gave 
up and used a Mac OS X 10.2 machine (which I needed for testing anyway) 
and built Python and all the extensions and transferred it to my 10.3 
box.  I have a deploy script that sets up the environment properly and 
runs the py2app setup.py from that 10.2 compatible interpreter and 
everything just works.

> Markus got annoyed by some people's rather loose behavior with his 
> source code (and their even looser interpretation of what "forking" 
> and GPL compatibility mean) and jerked everything but the code to 
> PySol and the pysolsoundserver from his site.  If you take my modified 
> tarball of his code and get the data files from one of my disk images, 
> you can build a version compatible with your system.  The 
> pysolsoundserver uses SDL, SDL_mixer, and smpeg.  Markus has provided 
> a configure file and a setup.py.in for the sound server which will 
> work with a little minor tweaking (fix the paths, if necessary).
>
> There was a bug which prevented PySol from starting if the sound 
> server could not be imported, but I fixed it so the sound server is 
> now optional, but recommended.

Offering source code is the only feasible option to support Python 
software on versions of Mac OS X older than your build environment.  
That's just how it is.  It might be somewhat different between 10.3 and 
10.4, but I'm not going to make any promises.

-bob