[Pythonmac-SIG] (no subject)

[Bob Ippolito]

On May 10, 2005, at 1:00 PM, Chris Barker wrote:

> Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>
>> The same is true for something like DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH. This might
>> also be
>> useful for testing but can cause serious problems when you always set
>> it
>
> Sure, but no one would mess with DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH in nearly so  
> casual
> a way as people mess with PYTHONPATH.
>
> I think the root of the problem here is that in common usage,  
> Python is
> not considered a core system component. Everyone who uses it tends to
> behave as though their application is the only one using python on the
> system. It is not treated as a core system component, like the linker,
> for instance. This is the case both with folks that put together  
> the os
> (RedHat, Apple, IBM), who use it and have not taken into consideration
> that other applications might well want to use different versions,  
> etc,
> and with application builders, that do things like mess with  
> PYTHONPATH
> for their own application.
>
> I'd like to see Python accepted as a core system component, but this
> would require more discipline by everyone, as well as a few things we
> don't have like a standard way to do version management, of both  
> python
> and python packages. Until then, we're probably better of thinking of
> python like a statically linked library: each instance should have
> nothing to do with any other instance, which is why I recommend the
> Py2App default to ignoring PYTHONPATH.

If you're going to treat it like that, then you should definitely  
stay away from the pre-installed Python and use one of the "third  
party" Pythons when building your applications.

FWIW, all py2app built applications that depend on Apple's Python 2.3  
will probably break on Mac OS X 10.5, whenever that comes out,  
because presumably it will only ship with Python 2.4 (or 2.5).

-bob