[Pythonmac-SIG] Some questions about going to MacOS X 10.4

[Russell E. Owen]

In article <3773FB37-F878-419C-80BD-E9869A8881B1 at redivi.com>,
 Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com> wrote:

> On Aug 23, 2005, at 1:58 PM, Russell E. Owen wrote:
> 
> > I've been considering upgrading my Mac to 10.4.2. However, I notice  
> > that
> > there are very few python packages for 10.4 at
> > <http://pythonmac.org/packages/>...
> 
> The version marker for a package is the minimum required version  
> (really -- the version of Mac OS X on which it was built).  10.3  
> packages work fine on 10.4, especially those for Python 2.4.

That is great news!

It would be helpful for the page to note that fact. Any suggestions on 
how to encourage or help that to happen?

> > Also, I distribute a semi-standalone python app (which includes
> > everything except python itself). Right now it's compatible with  
> > 10.3.x
> > and 10.4.x. But if I upgrade...are users on 10.3.9 likely to be  
> > able to
> > use an app created under 10.4.x 9 (with the built-in python 2.3.5)? In
> > case it matters, I presently create the app with bundlebuilder,  
> > though I
> > plan to switch to py2app someday.
> 
> Well, semi-standalone apps are basically guaranteed not to work on  
> 10.5, so you really should be looking to do standalone apps unless  
> you want to maintain multiple versions in the future.

I would prefer fully standalone, I just didn't know how to make it 
happen (bundlebuilder has the flag but I don't recall it actually 
working) until...

> > As an aside, I'd love to upgrade to python 2.4.x but then to  
> > distribute
> > my app I'd have to figure out how to build a fully standalone app (one
> > that includes python).
> 
> If you're using py2app, that happens by default when using a non- 
> System interpreter.

Perfect. And I'm guessing that py2app can be asked to make fully 
standalone even if using the built-in python interpreter (thus allowing 
me to eventually build on 10.5 and run on 10.4).

Thank you very much for all your help. This is excellent news all around.

Plus it offers the perfect justification to switch to py2app. I already 
refactored my code a few months ago to simplify packaging. (I had 
resource files mixed in with bits of python code to make the resource 
files easier to find, and my main module search for modules to load at 
startup. Both of which worked fine but made packaging a pain).

-- Russell