[Pythonmac-SIG] Status of PyObjC port to Intel OS X

[Daniel Lord]

On May 15, 2006, at 19:11, Marcin Komorowski wrote:

> Thanks to all who have replied with information, and especially to
> Bob for pointing me to a location where I can find a bunch of recent
> universal binary builds of python components.  I have not found a
> link to this page on the Internet before, hopefully your post will
> help search engines find it.
>
> Here is a bit of extra information, what I got to work and the
> question I still have:
>
> - I am a recent Mac convertee (what took me so long?), and I am
> setting up PyObjC on my iMac for the first time
> - I originally tried PyObjC v1.3.7, the latest package I found at
> http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/ and of course that did not work
>
> With the help of the wonderful people on this list:
> - I have checked out the latest PyObjC using subversion (here comes
> my CVS-to-subversion conversion) and built it with Python 2.3.5,
> which comes pre-installed with OS X 10.4
> I have managed to do a build, install the package, and than used
> XCode to build a sample PyObjC application - awesome.
>
> Now, are there any side affects of switching the system over to use
> python 2.4?  I have played around a bit with installing MacPython 2.4
> (once again thanks to Bob's link) but I found that XCode picks up /
> bin/python (which is 2.3.5) and not /usr/local/bin/python, which is
> where MacPython 2.4 installs a link to its binary.  Being new to Mac
> I must ask - is it safe to just point python binary links in /bin to
> match those found in /usr/local/bin or should I be weary of some side
> affects?

Marcin,

As Bill said _DON'T DO THIS_(TM). Please save yourself grief.

The best thing to do is let the Third-Party Python installer put  
Python 2.4 in /usr/local/bin and then ensure your $PATH place /usr/ 
local/bin before /usr/bin sequentially thus causing the Python 2.4 to  
be found first when searching for the 'python' command. In this way,  
'things' expecting to find Python 2.3 using absolute paths of /usr/ 
bin and Apple's installation don't break. While 'things' created to  
utilize Python 2.4 in /usr/local/bin function as expected. I, while  
no 'power-user', have been using this scheme successfully fr months  
now with no undesirable side effects so far.

Daniel

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail  
better."
–Samuel Beckett