[Pythonmac-SIG] Universal binary extensions questions [was: Re: suggestions for an appscript FAQ]

[has]

Jeremy Reichman wrote:

> I just found out about appscript, and one of my early questions is  
> "can I
> install it as a universal binary?" If I can't do that, my next  
> question is
> "can I install it for both architectures simultaneously, on either  
> PowerPC
> or Intel?" (I happen to do sys admin and would like to install it  
> once for
> both architectures if possible.)


This is more of a general distutils/setuptools/Mac Python question,  
and would be better covered by their FAQs if they aren't already. If  
anyone has links to those FAQs, let me know and I'll add them to the  
'Getting more help' section of the appscript FAQ.

To try to answer your question: it depends on what Python build you're  
installing it on and if it's a UB itself or not. OS X's default Python  
frameworks are a bit quirky in their build settings, e.g. Tiger's  
Python 2.3.5 is, IIRC, platform-specific; Leopard's Python 2.5 is a  
four-way UB, but its out-of-the-box configuration is a bit duff which  
causes some hassles for building UB extensions (I think they're two- 
way UB, but labelled by architecture). Third-party Python  
distributions may have different default build rules; if you're using  
one of those, you need to check yourself.

FWIW, I currently provide 32-bit UBs of appscript 0.18.1 for Python  
2.5.x as pre-built eggs, which you can install via setuptools'  
easy_install. The 'i386' and 'ppc' eggs are UBs built on Leopard  
Python, hence the wonky naming. The 'fat' egg is built with the  
official Mac Python distribution off python.org, but Leopard Python  
ignores it, which is why I have to distribute three eggs to do the  
same job instead of one <sigh>. There's also a source .tar.gz  
distribution which you can d/l and build yourself, or setuptools will  
use it automatically if it can't find a suitable egg for your Python  
distribution.

Anyway, other folks here know more about this stuff than I do, so  
hopefully they can chip in with more information if you want to  
provide more details about your setup.

HTH

has
-- 
Control AppleScriptable applications from Python, Ruby and ObjC:
http://appscript.sourceforge.net