[Pythonmac-SIG] Questions about various bits of Intel status

[Andrew Barnert]

I'm guessing these answers are all out there
somewhere, but I can't find them. So I apologize if
I'm being stupid, but:

First, what's up with ctypes and other things that
need libffi? They complain that it hasn't been ported
to darwin x86 and punt. The latest information I could
find was a blog at bob.pythonmac.org that says it's
been ported, but has no link or information. It looks
like PyObjC has a port, but it doesn't work. Should I
be looking on the PyObjC and/or ctypes lists instead
of here? (A quick search didn't turn up any obvious
answers, but I didn't look in-depth.)

Next, have the python24-fat changes been ported to the
2.5 trunk? If not, should it be relatively easy to do
myself, or should I just wait for the gurus to check
it in? If it should be doable, at what version and tag
was python24-fat forked from the tree (so I can pull
the stock equivalent and make diffs to start from)?

How exactly are you supposed to properly install a
framework build? I assume that if you sudo make
installframeworks, you can't install any modules via
.pkg files. (At least the docs say not to do this, and
it seems the most likely reason.) But if you just make
installframeworks, it fails on /usr/local/{bin,lib}. I
ended up sudo'ing it and chgrp/chmod -R on the
frameworks, but there must be a better way. Maybe
change the makefiles to install -m775/664 instead of
755/644, and -gadmin for the framework bits only? But
that may not be what you want when building a
package/darwinport/etc.? Without digging through the
makefile structure, I'm not sure....

Are trunk builds supposed to mostly work on an Intel
Mac? By "mostly work" I mean that if something works
on a linux box off the trunk, and on it's in the 2.4
official unofficial release candidate universal
installer and works on my Intel box, it'll also work
on building off the trunk on my Intel Mac. I'm not
expecting any better.... But there are a bunch of
things that seem to work in trunk/linux and
2.4.2/universal but not trunk/Intel mac:
* test_curses is skipped, even though curses appears
to work
* all tests that require networking are skipped, even
though at least
   some (maybe all) of the relevant modules work
* test_re fails
* test_{unicode,unicodedata,codecs} fail
* test_{aepack,applesingle,macostools} fail

I checked one of the tests, and the Unicode stuff does
seem to be wrong (u'\u2000'.isspace() returns False on
trunk, True on everything else). I haven't checked the
rest. No configure settings seem to make a difference
(unless I disable the relevant modules or totally
break the build).

Finally: Is there some known place to look for this
kind of info besides this list, pythonmac.org's wiki,
the current trunk code, the bug tracker, and random
googling? Is there any way to follow threads from this
list's archive without stopping and rooting around at
each month boundary? Is there a way to search the
archives other than googling with
site:http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig?

Thanks.