[Pythonmac-SIG] OSX 10.5 and 64-bit Python

[Ned Deily]

In article <BANLkTimvaYVw7SHH866KFiig9Hsyw5bvVw at mail.gmail.com>,
 Chris Weisiger <cweisiger at msg.ucsf.edu> wrote:

> Is there a readily-installable 64-bit Python for OSX 10.5? python.org only
> has 64-bit for 10.6, and while my searches have turned up instructions (of
> greater or lesser complexity) for building it from scratch, I'd rather use a
> vetted install if possible. Moreover, I'm eventually going to py2app this
> thing, and I'd rather not restrict my userbase based on their operating
> system version.

There is none from python.org.  If you intend to only provide a 
64-bit-only version of your app, that will, of course, exclude a 
significant portion of 10.5 and 10.6 users, i.e. those with earlier 
32-bit-only Intel processors and (for 10.5) PPC users.  And that's the 
main reason why such a configuration isn't provided on python.org.  The 
32-bit-only Pythons provided there will run on all Macs that run 10.3.9 
through 10.6.

If you do need 64-bit, it is possible to build a 10-5+ universal 
version.  I'd suggest looking at the Mac/BuildScript README.txt and 
build-installer.py script in the Python source tree.   The relevant 
option to the installer script is --universal-archs.  The current top of 
trunk for 2.7.x is here (and these files are more up-to-date than the 
2.7.1 released versions):

http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/76a2354aa427/Mac/BuildScript

You'd have to tweak the script a bit to get *just* 64-bit Intel, if you 
need that.

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org