Taking a step back, am I the only person who thinks the Python situation on Mac is absolutely ridiculous, although 10.2 looks better than 10.3.
As Bob says, you obviously haven't used 10.2...
Correct. I don't want to disparage the improvements that have been made, but the situation as it stands right now on Mac still seems really bad to me.
Compare to Windows:
http://www.python.org/2.3.5/
On Windows you just run the installer and all is fine. You can run the installer for as many versions as you want. Most extensions are distributed as installers as well. You just run them, they give you a list of installed compatible versions and where they are installed. You choose and all is fine. Uninstall can be done from the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs menu.
The instructions on that page also cover all the other UNIXen which work fine with the tar/configure/make/make install and correctly deal with with having multiple concurrent versions.
Mac isn't even mentioned on that page. The tar/configure/make/make install stuff does work. (I can't tell if it enables frameworks by default or not - wxPython requires a framework build, so I enabled it).
But when installing extensions such as wxPython that come with a graphical installer (yay!), they don't list the known Pythons on the system.
It is so close to being simple and friendly :-)
Don't you remember the days where Redhat came with Python 1.5.2 and if you upgraded that you broke redhat's tools? Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Yup. That hasn't been broken in years. For example on Redhat 9 the relevant Redhat tools use #!/usr/bin/python2.2
If you installed your own Python 2.2 it would end up under /usr/local so this wouldn't clash nor would others unless you installed over the main system one, in which case things will still be fine unless you use different options (eg differently sized unicode characters).
If you want your Python app to work in perpetuity, you'd better bundle a version of Python with it because one day OS X will presumably come with 2.4 or 2.5. This strikes me as being the same as any other platform.
I already do bundle the interpretter on Windows and Linux. For Mac the system interpretter isn't bundled (for good reason) by py2app. Others can be, but then there stems issues like getting other packages to install into them (eg wxPython).
Roger _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
