of the proposed change, skip to the bottom.
As some of you may know, Python 2.4's configure script and distutils has some
tricky behavior with regard to the ``MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET`` environment
variable on Mac OS X 10.3 and later. Unless otherwise specified, assume that I
am talking about a build environment of Mac OS X 10.3 or later. This behavior
is as follows:
If ``MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET`` is not set during configure:
1. distutils builds modules with
``-F/Python/Installation/Location -framework Python`` as per usual 2.3.x
behavior if it is also not set
2. If ``MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET`` is set during a later run of distutils, then
distutils complains that "10.3" mismatches the configure time setting of ""
This Python framework has the following misfeatures:
1. All your extensions are dependent on the installation location of this
particular Python
2. This installation of Python 2.4 *may break the building of extensions* for
any previous version of Python that uses the same distutils behavior. It
will certainly break them if they are installed to the same framework
directory, but if the version of Python 2.3 is early enough, such as the
stock 2.3.0, it will break that too. Also, any future version of Python
installed to the same frameworks directory *will break the building of
extensions* for this Python installation!
3. The Python framework will not be compatible with versions of Mac OS X
earlier than 10.3 anyway due to changes in libSystem!
This is stupid, and it should NOT be default behavior!
If ``MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET`` is set to "10.3" or higher during configure:
1. distutils builds modules with ``-undefined dynamic_lookup``
2. If ``MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET`` is set to something other than "10.3", or
unset, it will complain that the current setting mismatches the configure
setting of "10.3"
The features:
1. All your extensions are independent of the Python installation location,
and are thus compatible with any other Python with the same major version.
2. This installation of Python 2.4 will still, unavoidably, break the building
of extensions for any previous version of Python using the bad distutils
behavior mentioned above. This installation is not susceptible to
breakage, however.
The misfeatures:
1. You need to have ``MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET`` set during configure, most
people don't know to do this.
2. You also need to have ``MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET`` set when using
distutils. Even less people know to do this.
The solution to this is to have the following behavior instead:
1. If no ``MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET`` is set during configure, and the build
machine is Mac OS X 10.3 or later, then set it to "10.3".
2. If no ``MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET`` is set during distutils, but it WAS
set during configure, then set it to the configure time value.
3. Otherwise, if it is set to a LOWER value, then fail. Checking for an
exact match is bad, because the user or extension author should be
free to build a particular extension using 10.4 specific features
against a Python that is 10.3+ compatible.
For a build machine running Mac OS X 10.2 or earlier, it should ignore all of this behavior as per usual.
Unless anyone has a reasonable objection to this proposed solution, then we should make sure it goes into Python 2.4.1 and Python 2.3.5.
These threads might also be of interest: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/2004-November/012192.html http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/2004-December/012237.html http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/2004-December/012275.html
-bob
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