Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] Why Do I Explicitly Need MacPython

[Ronald Oussoren]

On Oct 3, 2006, at 6:24 PM, Christopher Barker wrote:

packages in a "native" format -- that means rpms on rpm based linux
systems, MS installers for windows, and mpkgs for the Mac.

So far, it appears the easiest way to make a package easy to install for a mac user is to make a *.mpgk of it. In fact, I've advocated for years that the best way to make python accessible on all platforms if to have

That depends on how you look at things ;-). As a system administrator I really prefer software that is installed using native packages, that way I have one repository to query to see what is installed. The disadvantage of using a native package system is that the python user has to remember which tool he has to use on every partical box instead of using something familiar. But for the mac we don't really have a choice, as you mentioned Apple doesn't ship a good package manager anyway, so we won't miss out a lot when we don't use .mpkg's.

Ronald Oussoren wrote:

I'm rather happy with setuptools, there are some cosmetic problems
(like the header-file thingy), but the core seems pretty well thought
out.

This features is apparently also on the list for the 0.7 release (but
not yet implemented).

Which reinforces that setuptools is a good option to pursue.

Yup.

I'm -0 on this. Easy-install is very convenient and I wish it were part

of Python 2.5 but it isn't. MacPython is at this point in time "just"
the official binary distribution of the python.org tree.


could be useful, but even then I'd be more inclined towards adding
useful GUI tools than libraries.

Growing it beyond that (that is include third party libraries and tools)

Which is what I'm talking about. I don't agree that "MacPython is at
this point in time "just" the official binary distribution of the

real additions are the pythonw (now called python) front end and a
little tweaking of shell start-up scripts, but those are important.

python.org tree". I've certainly got the impression that the goal is to make Python work smoothly and "natively" on the Mac. I suppose the only

Sure, but at this point in time all that work is done within the boundaries of the official python.org tree. That's not to say that this cannot change, and IMHO this should change at some point. I'd love to see better GUI tools than IDLE included with the official distribution.

to install packages.

Maybe installing setuptools by default is the thin end of the wedge, but I think it's critical that we do have a standard and easy way for people

There is one major problem with setuptools w.r.t. this: at least some of the python.org maintainers really dislike it for some reason or the other. That makes it including setuptools in the official python distribution for the mac a bit hairy.

to why it is more than trivial to make a small gui that will:

Pop up a dialog when you click on a *.egg, with a message like:

Would you like to install the python package: blah-blah-blah:
[install] [cancel]

if [install] is clicked, it would ask for the admin password, then
install the package.

If dependencies are required, it would pop up another dialog:


and install them by hand?
[auto-download] [I'll do it]


Am I wrong?

Key is that there is a default way to download an egg, click on it,
select all the defaults in a series of dialogs, and get your package
installed.

setuptools is still a bit of a mystery to me, but I'm still confused as The following other packages are required to install this one. Would you like these to be auto-downloaded for you, or would you like to download Thats it. I think setuptools provides that functionality at this point.

Ronald

Building such a gui would be straightforward if setuptools had the hooks to do so. Last time I checked setuptools had some hooks, but isn't capable of playing nice with a GUI event loop. My guess is that it is much more convenient to build a very shallow wrapper around easy_install, basicly just a window with a textbox where you can enter an easy_install command-line and larger textview to show the output of easy_install. Double-clicking on an egg can open this window with the right command-line filled in.

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