[Pythonmac-SIG] Advice on building binary installers for Python 2.7?

[Russell E. Owen]

I'd like to build binary installers for PIL and matplotlib for 
python.org Mac Python 2.7 but I confess I'm not sure how to go about it.

As I understand it there are two flavors of Mac Python 2.7: a 32-bit 
build that is compatible with Mac OS X 10.3.9 and later and a 64-bit 
build that requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

A complicating factor is that I have not figured out how to build 
matplotlib or PIL installers for Python 2.6 on 10.5 or 10.6 that were 
usable on 10.3.9 or 10.4. I built the libraries they depend on as static 
universal binaries but even so, it did not work. I ended up building 
everything on a Mac OS X 10.4 machine (which I have on long-term loan 
for that sole purpose).

I think the following is true, but I'd be most grateful for corrections:
- I'll need to make two installers per package, one for the 32-bit 
python, one for the 64-bit python.
- 32-bit python 2.7 should be trivial: treat it exactly like Python 2.6. 
Build the installers on a Mac OS X 10.4 machine using the existing 
static libraries I already built and all should be well.
- 64-bit python 2.7 is what I'm worried about. For building the 
dependent libraries do I have to use a particular gcc (e.g. 4.2 instead 
of 4.0)? What flags should I use? I'm guessing it would be safer to 
build on Mac OS X 10.5 than 10.6 (especially since the 10.6 XCode has 
some known issues -- components that were built incorrectly that cause 
warnings when one tries to build libraries).

Any pointers to documentation or advice would be most appreciated.

-- Russell

P.S. The numpy folks apparently were able to make a single binary 
installer that works everywhere with both versions of Python 2.7. I'm 
not sure how they managed that, but perhaps numpy doesn't require 
bringing in any static libraries (if it uses the built in numeric 
libraries).