[Pythonmac-SIG] For your eyes only: new 2.3rc1+ installer

[Andrew Shearer]

Thanks, Jack, for all the hard work on this! This is looking to be a  
great release.

The installer log had some warnings near the beginning:

	Failed to write location '/' to  
/tmp/.MacPython-OSX.pkg.1582.upgrade/Receipts/MacPython-OSX.pkg/ 
Contents/Resources/MacPython-OSX.loc
	Not removing  
/./Applications/MacPython-2.3/IDLE.app/Contents/Resources/idlelib  
because it is not empty.
	Not removing /./Applications/MacPython-2.3/IDLE.app/Contents/Resources  
because it is not empty.
	Not removing /./Applications/MacPython-2.3/IDLE.app/Contents because  
it is not empty.
	Not removing /./Applications/MacPython-2.3/IDLE.app because it is not  
empty.
	Not removing /./Applications/MacPython-2.3/Extras/Demo/stdwin because  
it is not empty.

These are probably minor, but I'm not sure how to interpret the first  
line; I wonder if is has anything to do with my root being non-writable  
(and therefore sendmail-friendly), though that still doesn't match the  
message. The "not removing" warnings aren't a problem now, but may  
cause future installers to leave an outdated file around if it has been  
renamed or deleted in the newer Python version.

An idea: the post-install script spends a while compiling the "test"  
directory, which isn't necessary for most users, so it could be skipped.

As for the truncated Installer ReadMe, saving as RTF rather than  
hard-wrapped plain text may help. I don't know if this happened to  
anyone else, but when I launched the installer, I saw about several  
blank lines at the top, and a couple of the lines below were strangely  
wrapped (meaning the original was wrapped at a larger width than the  
Installer window's). Fixing those would gain about seven lines. On top  
of that we could make the text smaller if necessary.

I'm sure the text will change before 2.3 final, but here's another  
draft with light edits to punctuation anyway. (Let me know if I should  
submit an RTF version somewhere.) It would be nice if we could find out  
for sure if the installer does work in the Panther preview so we could  
drop the Panther clause.

-begin
This package will install MacPython 2.3rc1+ for Mac OS X 10.2. It will  
not work on Mac OS X 10.1 and earlier, while installation on the  
Panther preview may work.

Installation requires approximately 20 MB of disk space. Ignore the  
message that it will take zero bytes. You must install onto your  
current boot disk (even though the installer does not enforce this)  
otherwise MacPython will not work.

MacPython consists of the Python programming language interpreter, plus  
a set of Macintosh programs to allow easy access to it (an integrated  
development environment, a Python extension package manager) and a set  
of pre-built extension modules that open up specific Macintosh  
technologies to Python programs (Carbon, AppleScript, QuickTime, and  
more).

The installer places applications in a MacPython-2.3 subfolder of your  
Applications folder, along with command-line tools in /usr/local/bin,  
and the underlying machinery in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework.

The PythonIDE application has a Help command that gets you started  
quickly with MacPython and contains references to other documentation.

For more information on MacPython, see  
http://www.cwi.nl/~jack/macpython.html. For more information on Python  
in general, see http://www.python.org.
-end

As far as actual functionality, it's working well so far.

On Wednesday, July 23, 2003, at 11:29 AM,  
pythonmac-sig-request at python.org wrote:

> From: Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com>
>
>     Jack> I should add a note about this to the welcome message  
> (except that
>     Jack> that will make it go off the edge of the window even more:-).
>
> Can you add a button to allow the user to save the message to a file?
--
Andrew Shearer
Medical Computing, Lifespan