Mac porting advice?

[Todd Miller]

Porting numarray to the Macintosh has been on our TODO list at STSCI for 
  a while and we're finally doing it.  Right now, I have a shell account 
on a Mac running OS-X down the hall.  Installing the "UNIX version" of 
Python and using the distutils to re-compile and install numarray, 
almost everything "just works."  But since I'm not a Mac developer,  I 
have a ton of questions:

1. If I build a binary distribution of numarray using the "UNIX version" 
of Python under Mac OS-X, can it be used with a native Mac version of 
Python?  Looked at as a package, numarray includes both native python 
code and C extension modules.

2.  The only hard part porting numarray to the Mac was floating point 
exception handling.  On Linux, we use "fenv.h" to provide the FP 
exception handling functions.   I found an "fenv.h" in the FlatCarbon
header directory.  Using that, and -framework Carbon in a manual link,
everything worked.  But...

a. Should I be using Carbon?  Are there any other ways to get the 
equivalent of fenv.h?

b. Assuming I want to, how do I build a Python that just uses Carbon 
automatically in distutils?

c. How do I "trick" the distutils into using "-framework Carbon" to link 
for any Mac Python?  The extension options I know about *append* to the 
command line, which doesn't seem to work for -framework Carbon.

3. What are the CPP macros for detecting Mac-hood?  I see "darwin" used 
in the Python source,  but I had to add it to distutils myself as an 
extra_compile_arg: -Ddarwin

4. How good is the free C development IDE for the Mac?  (Am I wasting my 
time in a shell account?)  Is OS-X 10.2 worth getting?  We have 10.1 now.


Thanks in advance,
Todd

-- 
Todd Miller 			jmiller at stsci.edu
STSCI / SSB