[Pythonmac-SIG] Installing PyObjC via PackMan

[Kevin Ollivier]

On Thursday, July 31, 2003, at 12:04  PM, Kevin Altis wrote:

> For many distributions, it is crucial to keep the samples and 
> documentation
> in sync with the actual Python package (dir with __init__.py file). 
> This
> issue comes up periodically with PythonCard and while I would like to 
> have
> the documentation and samples in a directory other than
> site-packages/PythonCardPrototype it is more important that the user 
> doesn't
> mix versions and get unexpected errors.
>
> We solved the problem on Windows by having Python 2.3 distutils create 
> a
> Program Files group with shortcuts to the main tools, documentation and
> samples launcher. The Linux RPMs have something similar, though 
> distutils
> does not have direct support for that and someone had to build the RPMs
> separately. On the Mac, I would love to be able to have distutils or 
> some
> other standard mechanism for creating a PythonCard folder under the
> Applications/MacPython folder or other logical place. I would also be 
> happy
> having an Applications/PythonCard folder as an option.
>
> Using symlinks/aliases to the actual locations in site-packages seems 
> to
> make the most sense. I am still confused about the reasoning behind
> splitting code, docs, samples, etc. on Linux and can never remember 
> where to
> look for all the pieces. Let's not repeat that mistake.

I think symlinks work for this too, and I certainly agree we don't want 
it getting messy like on Linux. ;-)

> I still haven't figured out how I'm going to deal with some of the 
> tools
> like the codeEditor which really needs to be turned into a standalone 
> with
> bundlebuilder so users can drag and drop from the Finder. Building the
> standalones might need to be part of the distutils process. Maybe we 
> can
> cover that kind of problem in a separate thread.

I have always thought that distutils should do this as well. This 
should probably be addressed when bundlebuilder is a bit smarter (i.e. 
can  detect external libraries which are required by the script).

> The problem of user-modifiable elements should be handled separately by
> creating files and dirs in the users home directory and is not 
> something
> PackMan should have to deal with. Again, for PythonCard we started out 
> with
> a .pythoncard dir but the Unix convention of using a leading dot to 
> hide
> files and dirs just seemed to confuse people that couldn't find their
> configs in the Finder and it didn't translate well to Windows either, 
> so the
> dir name was changed to "pythoncard_config" in release 0.7.1

Just a question - by user-modifiable elements are you referring only to 
config files? If so, have you considered using ~/Library/Preferences to 
store the config folder? This is where program preferences are usually 
stored on Mac.

Thanks,

Kevin