[Pythonmac-SIG] Building extensions on 10.4 that can be used on 10.3?

[Russell E. Owen]

In article <43CD6D03.7090505 at noaa.gov>,
 Christopher Barker <Chris.Barker at noaa.gov> wrote:

> Russell E. Owen wrote:
> > Are there any tips or tricks to building 3rd party python extensions on 
> > MacOS X 10.4 in such a way that 10.3 users can use them?
> 
> It can be done, but I think it's PITA
> 
> > <http://pythonmac.org/packages/> has most or all the extensions I need, 
> > but some of the ones I use are fairly outdated (especially numarray). So 
> > another option is to contribute modern versions built on 10.3 before I 
> > upgrade. But I'm not sure how practical that is; I only have 10.3/Python 
> > 2.3
> 
> Installing 2.4.1 from undefined.org/python is pretty trivial.
> 
> In fact, using the 2.4.1 Framework build for OS-X 10.3, and installing 
> it on both 10.3 and 10.4 might well do what you want. I know the 10.3 
> stuff will all run on 10.4, it's just a question of what C libs get 
> linked if you build on 10.4, using the 10.3 Python. I suspect that if 
> you use distutils, it might all work, but if you build everything on 
> 10.3, you're all set.
> 
> > with instructions on how to create 
> > the package.
> 
> This is very easy for anything that builds with distutils. Py2App comes 
> with bdist_mpkg, which will build a *.mpkg from setup.py. The only 
> tricky part is external libs. For instance, for matplotlib, I need to 
> make sure it statically linked libpng and libfreetype, so that the 
> package would run on a stock OS-X.
> 
> It would be great if you contributed some upgraded packages to pythonmac.

Gladly!

Mostly I want to see numarray 1.5 there. It has C code and links to 
LAPACK and BLAS. So...do I somehow need to make it statically link? If 
so, how do I do that? The instructions for building numarray don't say 
and several searches on the topic didn't turn up anything.

As to Ronald Oussoren's reply: you're absolutely right. I'll have to 
keep a MacOS X 10.3 machine around anyway for testing, so I might as 
well build the application on that. Sigh.

-- Russell