[Pythonmac-SIG] History of Python in MacOSX

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jan 29, 2005, at 4:28, Just van Rossum wrote:

> Robert White wrote:
>
>> I started with Jaguar, MacOSX 10.2, where Python was built as a
>> framework.
>
> The Python that shipped with 10.2 was not a framework build, but an
> "ordinary" static unix build, or whatever the correct term for that is.

Mac OS X 10.2 shipped with Python 2.2.0, which was rife with bugs (both 
cross-platform and Mac specific bugs).  A shared library was not 
available, so this Python could not be embedded in other software.  
Thus, application bundles that bootstrapped with this Python needed to 
use a shell script or equivalent that did an execve(...) call to 
/usr/bin/python.  Additionally, the config/Makefile for this Python had 
some compiler flags related to x86 cross-compilation that Apple 
neglected to remove from their production build, thus it was necessary 
to sudo vi this file or mangle distutils a bit at runtime from setup.py 
in order to build extensions at all.

Not terribly long after Mac OS X 10.3 and Python 2.3.0 came out, people 
stopped supporting this Python 2.2.0, because it was horrible.

-bob