[Pythonmac-SIG] My stab at a new page

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 9, 2006, at 1:48 PM, Bill Janssen wrote:

>> It is useless to me.
>
> That's what I mean by parochial.
>
> Bob, I completely understand and sympathize with what you are saying
> here.  And for your purposes, these are completely legitimate  
> complaints.

I'd say pragmatic, not parochial.  I understand your concerns but why  
should we spend our precious and limited resources bothering with a  
Python distribution that can only support a subset of uses.

If we ignore the vendor's interpreter then our documentation becomes  
MUCH simpler as there will be one -- and preferably only one -- way  
to do it: install a Python interpreter that is recent and can run the  
full scope of Python applications.  We also get to ignore the issues  
of which version of Mac OS X they are using because 10.3 and 10.4  
will behave the same, and we have the opportunity to fix the issues  
that constantly plague users such as python vs pythonw (we can simply  
make the symlinks in /usr/local/bin both point at pythonw).

> But there are lots of "pure Unix" programs which it works quite well
> for.  I do a lot of text processing, web-page re-writing, web
> spidering, etc. which works fine with the pre-installed Python.  I do
> image0-processing with PIL and PDF generation with ReportLab which
> works fine.  And to not support -- even celebrate -- those uses is,
> IMO, self-defeating.

Sure, but all of that stuff works even better with a newer  
distribution of Python due to enhancements in the interpreter.   
There's no disadvantage to glossing over the fact that there is an  
interpreter that ships with OS X.

>> The minimal effort it takes to use a third party installation of
>> Python is well worth it, and it becomes more useful as time goes on.
>> Doubly so now that Leopard is approaching, because users can upgrade
>> without losing all of their Python work to major version upgrade  
>> death.
>
> To begin with, I don't see a stability in the current state of
> MacPython that gives me confidence in this assurance.  But I agree
> that the effort of installation is minimal, and should be encouraged.

Right now, the current state of MacPython is effectively the current  
state of Python itself.  If you don't trust Python 2.4, how do you  
trust Python 2.3?  Given Apple's track record of making Python worse  
(though they are consistently improving), your viewpoint makes no  
sense to me.

> Should we officially encourage Apple not to include Python in their
> next release?  That would solve lots of these problems, I think.

Our problem with Apple's bundling of Python is purely a documentation  
issue (and the stubbornness of those who insist that it should be  
used -- even celebrated -- despite its disadvantages).  If we make  
the proposed PATH change script to the installer, we can ignore the  
system Python just as easily as we could if it wasn't there at all.

There's little good reason for us to petition for its removal, and  
there's good reason for them to keep it there: they use it.

-bob