[Pythonmac-SIG] [Pyobjc-dev] ANN: py2app 0.5

[Virgil Dupras]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 9:13 PM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've just uploaded py2app 0.5 and new versions of altgraph, modulegraph and macholib. I hope this solves most issues with py2app.   "easy_install-X.Y -U py2app" should install the software for you (where X.Y is your favorite version of Python)
>
> There is one new feature in this release: experimental support for python 3.   This basicly means that I managed to build a single application as a standalone application bundle, without much testing.   Alias builds and plugin bundles almost certainly don't work (the first because alias builds use the Carbon module which isn't available in python 3, the latter because I had to rewrite the C code in the application bundles and probably have to do the same for plugin bundles).
>
> Ronald
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>

Thanks a bunch Ronald, your work is very very much appreciated. I
tried to build my app on a whole spanking new stack (Python 2.7,
pyobjc 2.3 and py2app 0.5.2) and it worked (I use the plugin feature).
I had, however, to erase the prebuilt files and re-build them.

This brings a question: I noticed that you added several new prebuilt
for each architecture combination. I ask: why using prebuilt at all?
Why not simply have the setup build the thing on the user machine upon
install? This way the user gets binaries that exactly correspond to
the cflags he used when building python. Are there cases where a
py2app user would want any other cflags?

I only recently discovered the pythonmac-sig and I saw your call for
help. It's sad that nobody answered yet, but I can't say I'm
surprised. Like I told you at EuroPython, I'd like to help but I have
a very hard time understanding py2app's convoluted code base
(distutils is probably to blame for that, god I hate
distutils/setuptools). I guess it's the same thing for other users.

I also had an interesting discussion with Alex Morega. He was asking
me why I used py2app at all. He gave me a link
(http://github.com/alex-morega/tinymail and
http://github.com/alex-morega/WhizbangPlugin ) to his Python/Cocoa
apps which don't use any packaging. It turns out the reason he can get
away without py2app or bundlebuilder is because he uses the system
Python and doesn't have other dependencies, but it still raises
questions: Is it possible that py2app is a little too complex for what
it does?

I was thinking maybe it would be a good idea to go toward code
simplification in py2app and that a good way to start would be to get
rid of distutils.

In any case, if nobody's on it, I'd gladly take care of the
documentation modernization.

Virgil Dupras