Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] best way to install packages?

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 3-feb-2006, at 18:59, Christopher Barker wrote:

Andrew Jaffe wrote:

Anyway, is there a 'best' way to install python packages on a
mac nowadays? It seems that there at least three possibilities:

   - plain old setup.py install
   - bdist_mpkg

do this)

- eggs (in which case I realize I'm not sure I know exactly *how* to

The "Best" way to install packages is to use whatever form you get. If

if you the source, use setup.py.

I'm not just being glib here. I wonder if you, in fact, are asking a
larger question, which it would be nice to discuss here:

What is the best way to distribute packages? Now you have to consider
the three options above:

1) Just distribute the source with a setup.py
2) Use bdist_mpkg to build a mpkg
3) Build and egg.

The reason I make this distinction is that if you are getting just the
source from a package maintainer, there is little reason to go though
the trouble of making mpkgs or eggs, if you only want to install it on
your own machine. slight modification to that:

The is no reason to make a mpkg.

You might want to make an egg, so that you can get the versioning
control eggs give you (and some other features, but versioning control

maintainer hasn't set up setup.py to build and egg, it's probably not
worth it.

you get an egg, use easy-install, if you get a mpkg, point and click it, is the big one) However, if it's just for your purposes, and the package

Even more important that versioning is that eggs give you an easy way
to uninstall software (although I'm not quite sure about scripts). The
normal distutils makes it very hard to uninstall some packages because
they install multiple toplevel packages and it is not always immediately
obvious which files they install.

source package on their Mac would contribute a binary package to the
community. Mac users like binary packages!

I suggest the following for making a package that can be distributed:

- Make an egg.
- If you can't figure out how to make an ebb, use bdist_mpkg

so that may get easy.


work (reliably) with the version of Python that you build it with. I
think the versions we should support are:

Bob's "official unofficial" 2.4.1 framework build for 10.3 (this will
run on 10.4 also)

2.4.1 framework build for 10.4

That being said, I would love it if EVERYONE that downloads and builds a - I think Bob is working on making py2app support eggs with bdist_mpkg, However, keep in mind that when you make a binary package, it will only

for causual users.

Don't. There should be only one binary installation of Python 2.4.x for every x and than one should work on 10.3 and 10.4. This makes live a lot easier

that's lower priority.

And these packages should be put up on pythonmac.org

One other note:

The Framework builds put the "bin" directory inside the Framework.
That's where scripts get installed by default. What that means is that
in order to use them, the user needs to add that directory to their
PATH. This isn't a big deal, but it reminds me too much of the old DOS
days, where you needed to add something to your PATH for every darn
piece of software you installed. I much prefer the *nix standard of

see the default scripts directory be /use/local/bin.

There's something to be said for supporting Apple's pythons but I think having a few locations where executables get installed, and I's like to

in directories below /opt, such as /opt/python2.4, /opt/gnome, ....


to install software using older versions of python.

BTW. modern unix systems assume that additional software will bin installed I'd prefer /Library/Python/2.x/bin as the directory where scripts get placed because that directory is easily visible in the Finder and allows you to install software for both python2.3 and python2.4. I regularly do that to make it easier

just tell people to add the Framework bin directory to their PATH.

Should this be the standard? How could we accomplish that? Or should we

The bin directory inside the framework is a bit to hidden for most users
and hard to get to using the Finder.

Mostly I feel strongly that, as a community, we need to establish
standard ways of doing Python on OS-X, and publish them somewhere. I'm
not picky about what those standards are, as long as they exist.

Off to hack on another universal python build,

        Ronald

I'll defer to any standard once it is here :-). Feel free to write a proposal about a standard, including what needs to be done to get there ;-)

-Chris



--
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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