On Mar 14, 2006, at 7:00 AM, Rodney Somerstein wrote: > Thanks for the answer, Bob, and thanks for the work on the > Universal build, Ronald. If someone could answer my other questions > as well, I would really appreciate it. > > As a beginner, what does having a working readline actually mean to > me? If I'm not building command line apps do I need that for user > input? And why wouldn't ActiveState have one? Given that > ActiveState seems to put forth the effort to make a release of > Python that is compatible across multiple platforms, including a > Universal Mac build, why does the MacPython community maintain a > separate framework build? (No criticism intended here, I want to > understand this)
readline provides for command history (the up arrow, etc.). ActiveState does not provide it because it is GPL. It's possible to install this after the fact, but it's only easy because I've made it available as a separate package.. normally it's a pain in the ass to do because readline is part of Python's source tree and doesn't readily build externally (not a big deal, but most people aren't up to writing setup.py files for code they didn't write). ActiveState's efforts on the various platforms really don't have anything to do with each other. There isn't really anything technical that differentiates ActiveState Python from the mainline distro, at least on OS X. > Again, is there really any reason that I would want to use one > release over the other? Is it simply a matter of readline, whatever > that buys me (I'm obviously a beginner to Python even though I've > read a bit about it over the years) or is there some other major > reason? Such as, will I have problems creating redistributable app > bundles with ActiveState since Bob seems to be working mostly with > the MacPython build? How about other add-on libraries I might want > to use? The PPC builds are indistinguishable technically beyond the changelog from 2.4.1 to 2.4.2 (and the absence of readline -- maybe also bsddb support? -- in ActiveState's distro). These questions are irrelevant. The universal build is what you want to be using, though. However, caveat emptor, because py2app doesn't *yet* work universal. It will soon, and that's the only scenario I'm really going to be testing future versions of py2app with. > If I go with the MacPython framework build, how likely is it to > catch up to the current release of Python? I notice that it has > been 6 months since the 2.4.2 release and it isn't easy for a new > user to find links to a "official" Mac build of this version. I do > note that Ronald has stated he will put out a 2.4.3 build when > 2.4.3 is release, but I can't even find links to 2.4.2 on > python.org. Is this likely to change? First off, the biggest reason that 2.4.2 hasn't been released in binary form by us is that I didn't want to bother with another release until we handled the i386 situation, and secondly it doesn't have all that many relevant changes. It simply wasn't worth the effort of doing a micro release when we knew we were going to be obsoleting the PPC-only builds altogether ASAP. The universal build is considered to be of release candidate quality. It will be the build on python.org when we've decided that it's final. At this point, we don't expect to make any meaningful changes to what Ronald has in his disk image. The universal build was built against the Python 2.4 maintenance branch as of a few weeks ago and includes patches that aren't yet in 2.4.2 and many patches relevant to i386. It's likely to have bugfixes that ActiveState's distro does not have and will not have until the release of 2.4.3, especially for i386, unless they decide to switch to using the same universal branch. -bob _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
