[Pythonmac-SIG] State of Python on the Mac

[Nicholas Riley]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2003 at 08:51:11PM -0500, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> On Sunday, Mar 2, 2003, at 20:04 America/New_York, John W Baxter wrote:
> 
> >And, just to stir things up (actually, it's a serious question),
> >what impact will Apple's X11 implementation have, when it becomes
> >part of the Mac OS X install CDs (really optional? pseudo-optional
> >like BSD subsystem?  part of the base?)?  Or final but acquired
> >separately.
> >
> >Should person hours being devoted to making X11 things work in Cocoa be
> >shifted to something else?  If X11 will be "acquired separately" 
> >probably not.
> 
> As far as I can tell, it's pretty worthless without fink, because it 
> doesn't come with any useful libraries (gnome, kde, etc).  Also, I 
> don't think these libraries are available anywhere without fink.
> 
> If you need fink anyways, what good is Apple's X11 distribution?  I 
> don't particularly want to install fink.

An example Apple used to demonstrate its X11 port was MATLAB, a
commercial X11-based app.  There are several other large non-GNOME and
KDE applications which are commonly distributed as binary-only, such
as OpenOffice.

That said, I don't think Apple should ship X11 as a standard part of
the install - it'll encourage even more half-hearted ports such as
MATLAB.  X11 is not 'native' for OS X, and I prefer to use
Carbon/Cocoa ports of things such as Tk and GNU Emacs wherever
possible.  As is, I can do all my Python work without having to run
X11, and I would prefer to keep it that way.

-- 
=Nicholas Riley <njriley@uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>
        Pablo Research Group, Department of Computer Science and
  Medical Scholars Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign