[Pythonmac-SIG] a beginner's list

[Bill Janssen]

> Unless you're a unix person, there's very few useful things you can  
> do with Python 2.3 sans third party extensions

Ah, I think I'm beginning to understand all the confusion.

MacOS X is the largest-selling UNIX distro in the world.  Linux and
Solaris people are deserting in droves and moving to Apple machines
running OS X.  There's a huge and growing population of Unix people
using Macs.  So this ("unix person") is a non-negligible audience.
May even be a majority of Mac users by now.

Full disclosure:  I'm a UNIX person.  The first thing I do when I get a
new Mac is make sure X11 is installed on it, and in my Login Items.
The second thing I do is build an X11 version of GNU Emacs from the
CVS repository.  I don't mind the Terminal's oddities because I never
use it; all my shells are in Emacs shell buffers.  I rarely use the
Finder; it seems a fairly dorky program.  But I like the Mac as a very
nice UNIX platform with cute visual glitz.

I pretty much never write Mac-specific code.  For me, the supplied
Python works pretty well; I can't write past Python 2.3 anyway (though
I'd like to), because there are lots of machines in my target
population that still aren't running 2.4, so I have to be
conservative.  Just going to 2.3 is a bit daring -- you have to check
to see where it is in the Debian packaging chain, for instance.

A great deal of my code works with just the basic Python and stdlib.
Sometimes I need to require PIL or reportlab or Medusa.  And on the
Mac, just unpacking the sources for those extensions and then saying
"python setup.py install" (in a shell) works just fine.  The
additional complexity of installing packages and eggs seems overkill.

I can see that if you are a pre-MacOSX Mac person, used to all the
groundbreaking UI complexity of Apple in the 80's and 90's, your view
and your needs might be different.  Or if you are a for-Mac developer.
But most people aren't.

Bill