[Pythonmac-SIG] Which version to use??

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 25 May, 2010, at 18:18, Rodney Somerstein wrote:

> On Tuesday, May 24, 2010, Aahz wrote:
>> If you care about the Mac (particularly in terms of being able to use
>> PyObjC and/or py2app), stick with 2.x for now.  Otherwise, it doesn't
>> matter much which exact version of 3.x you use.
> 
> This brings up a question for me as to what the state of Python is on the Mac. Python 3.x has been a available for quite awhile. I see on Python.org that 3.1.2 is listed as the current download for the Mac. What exactly is the current state of this? What doesn't work on the Mac in Python 3 and what are current plans related to this?

Python 3.1.2 works fine on OSX. There is an issue with building extensions on OSX 10.6, but that will be fixed in 3.1.3.

PyObjC in the repository works with python 3 and I'm working towards a release. I haven't looked into py2app yet. With some luck it will work without major changes.

> 
> The Mac Python community seems pretty small. Given that Python seems to position itself as a major programming and scripting language, it seems rather strange that there is so little effort placed into providing first class support for the second most popular computing platform. I know that various individuals on this list put a tremendous amount of work into porting and supporting various parts of Python on the Mac platform. But what is the overall state of Python here? Especially in regards to Python 3, which seems to definitely be the future of the language.

Porting to py3k is an issue throughout the python community, mostly because cleanly porting non-trivial projects takes time. What hasn't helped is that a lot of project depend on setuptools and that didn't supported until pretty recently (and that only through the 'distribute' fork). 

As far as PyObjC is concerned port to py3k was a lot of work due to C-API changes and because PyObjC tries to provide seemless integration between Python and Cocoa, which means it is pretty sensitive to the large changes between python 2.x and 3.x.

> 
> I have looked at moving into Python several times over the years, but it always seems to be a second class language when it comes to producing programs to run on the Mac. At least outside of various command line tools. Is Python moving toward parity with the Windows and Unix world on the Macintosh?

What do you mean?  Python on OSX is support as well as it is on Linux and Windows.

Ronald

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