[Pythonmac-SIG] Someone had PIL trouble on i386 10.4.6 Python 2.4 IIRC--I succeeded this evening

[Christopher Barker]

Bob Ippolito wrote:
> *ALWAYS* prefer convenience over space.  Never make separate 
> distributions for i386 and PPC.  Simplicity is key.

Absolutely.

> I will no longer accept single-architecture packages for 
> pythonmac.org/packages except under special circumstances

However... Right now, we don't have Universal packages for most things. 
This creates a difficult situation for folks, particularly those on 
Intel Macs. It is a serious challenge to build Universal packages, at 
least for those packages that rely on third party libs (PIL, Matplotlib, 
wxPython....)

Until those folks with the skills to do it find the time to build some 
of the most common ones, I'm not sure it's such a bad idea to have a 
repository for i386 and PPC-only packages.

About those libs:

As it is a challenge to build universal libs, and a bunch of common 
python packages require the same libs, I'd love to see a repository of 
Universal libs for use with Python packages.

My suggestion:

A ExtraLibs.mpkg, right there with the packages on pythonmac.org that 
includes Universal shared libs required by some common packages. They 
could perhaps be installed in the Python Framework, so they won't 
interfere with anything else.

a) is this possible?
b) is this a good idea?

I suggest the following libs:

libfreetype
libpng
libjpeg

Other common ones?

-Chris


-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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