[Pythonmac-SIG] Which version to install?

Russell E. Owen rowen at uw.edu
Mon Aug 30 20:54:04 CEST 2010


In article <i5bind$sd3$1 at dough.gmane.org>,
 Monte Milanuk <memilanuk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> Now that I have things more or less back to the original for 10.6 on my 
> Macbook, I'd like to install a slightly more up-to-date version for 
> learning to develop with.  Some of the things I'm interested in working 
> with include wxpython/dabo, tkinter (with the new ttk themed widgets), 
> pygame, etc.  On the one hand I'd rather just jump straight to 3.1.x at 
> this point, but since a lot of the above don't seem to be ported to 3.x 
> yet... I guess that limits my choices?
> 
> So... which route would you recommend, and why:  MacPython from 
> python.org, Activestate Python, or MacPorts python.  Pros and cons would 
> be appreciated.

Python 2.6 is safest for now. 2.7 is quite new and some Mac binaries 
aren't available for it. Ditto for 3.x.

Most Mac binary installers are produces for the Python from python.org.

However, the python.org binaries all use Tcl/Tk 8.4 (presumably because 
that is the version Apple ships with MacOS X), which does not support 
tile/ttk. If you really need tile some options are:
- Install tile in Tcl/Tk 8.4
- Install Tcl/Tk 8.5 and then build Python from source. (If you use 
packages such as matplotlib and PIL that talk to tcl/tk then also build 
those from source).

-- Russell



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