[Pythonmac-SIG] a beginner's list

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 8, 2006, at 1:20 PM, Kevin Ollivier wrote:

> Hi Bob,
>
> On Feb 8, 2006, at 1:49 AM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
>>
>> On Feb 8, 2006, at 1:06 AM, Kevin Ollivier wrote:
>>
>>>> In addition, if you have your code running just fine and dandy  
>>>> under
>>>> Apple's python, then you upgrade to 10.5, chances are that your app
>>>> will
>>>> no longer work, as Apple is likely to yank their python out from
>>>> under
>>>> you.
>>>
>>> What do you mean by this? None of my Panther scripts stopped working
>>> under Tiger (I do have a couple ;-), and I didn't even touch Python
>>> 2.4 on Mac until around October, where they still worked as they
>>> always did on 2.3. Why should I now assume 10.5 is going to break  
>>> all
>>> my apps?
>>
>> Unless you're a unix person, there's very few useful things you can
>> do with Python 2.3 sans third party extensions (especially on
>> Panther, where wx and tkinter were not shipped). All of those
>> extensions, or at least a .pth hack if you just did an upgrade,
>> need to be installed to keep that working.  Applications built with
>> py2app or bundlebuilder are even worse off.
>>
>> Mac OS X 10.5 will surely ship with at least 2.4.2, which means all
>> extensions built against any previous vendor Python will break,
>> period.  Additionally, all of the WASTE-based stuff (the shipping
>> Python IDE, the worthless PackageManager, etc.) is incompatible
>> with i386.  Only the most basic mostly platform independent scripts
>> are going to work with Mac OS X 10.5.
>
> It's a bit confusing to talk as if needing new extensions ==
> breakage. (You know you're a geek when it's second nature to write
> equality tests like this. ;-) I remember Python 2.1 and I've had to
> upgrade several times, and I never thought of re-installing my
> extensions as 'fixing what broke'. I called it 'upgrading'. Some
> people may see initially see what appears to be broken scripts, but
> unfortunately that would just be because they aren't aware of issues
> that may occur when upgrading their Python install. I don't think the
> proper solution is to keep them from upgrading; we just need to build
> awareness that a new Python major version means new extensions.

We're talking about upgrading Mac OS X, which implicitly upgrades  
Python and obsoletes all of your extensions.  I'd call that breaking.

-bob