[Pythonmac-SIG] Why Do I Explicitly Need MacPython

Ronald Oussoren ronaldoussoren at mac.com
Thu Sep 21 07:54:23 CEST 2006


On Sep 21, 2006, at 3:10 AM, Robert Love wrote:

> I asked the original question and I want to thank folks for  
> contributing answers.
>
> On Sep 20, 2006, at 3:31 PM, Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>
>>
>> A major conceptual difference between MacPorts/Fink and MacPython  
>> is that the the first two are projects to use unix software on the  
>> mac, while MacPython is more focused on fitting in with the OS.
>
> Here is the statement that puzzles me the most.  OSX is Unix.  What  
> differences are you referring to?

OSX is more than plain unix, it is unix + loads of Apple goodies  
(Cocoa, CoreGraphics, other CoreFoo libraries) and conventions (use  
frameworks instead of plain libraries). Fink and DarwinPorts tend to  
ignore the Apple goodies and act as if OSX is just another linux  
distribution (to put it bluntly).

That is not necessarily a bad thing, just a different point of view.  
Heck, getting software to run properly isn't always easy and both  
DarwinPorts and Fink support a lot of software. Making all that blend  
in nicely with the OS would be a gigantic task.

>
> I long for the day when I can just grab the latest tarball, untar,  
> configure, make and make install and it builds and fits in with OSX.

That requires work to modify software to properly support OSX. For  
most GUI programs that is not a trivial task (and I don't consider  
"runs in Apple's X11 application" to be "fits in with OSX").

Ronald


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