[Pythonmac-SIG] Python-Ogre on Mac OS X?

[Matthias Baas]

Joe Strout wrote:
> I've just stumbled across the Python-Ogre project 
> (http://www.pythonogre.com/).  It looks fantastic, but the only binary 
> is for Windows.  That seems a little silly for a set of 
> cross-platform-language bindings to a cross-platform library.  :)
> 
> There are older build instructions for Mac OS X available, as well as 
> Linux (and pretty much anything that works on Linux can be made to work 
> on OS X).  And of course OS X has high-quality OpenGL drivers built in, 
> and a great uniformity of hardware and OS configurations compared to 
> Linux or Windows.  So it ought to be fairly easy to keep this running 
> well on the Mac, enabling great Python 3D game development that's truly 
> cross-platform.
> 
> But I don't know if I can do all that myself... is anyone else here 
> interested in this?  Perhaps we could share the maintenance.

Have you already tried building the bindings? Where did it fail?
I had a quick look into the svn repository and the wiki. Their build 
instructions describe how to do everything from scratch:

- Building the required C++ libs (Ogre, etc.)
- Generating the bindings source code using Py++
- Compiling the bindings

If you already have the C++ libraries installed or get the binaries from 
somewhere else (there is a binary on the Ogre site), then you can 
probably skip the first step.

I would recommend to skip the second step as well as this isn't the most 
straightforward thing to do on OSX (Apple's gcc is not the same as the 
regular gcc which is what gccxml is based on). And obviously, the 
generated sources exist already as they are building a Windows version, 
so why reinventing the wheel? I'm not aware that you have to regenerate 
the sources on every platform. When I was using Py++ for a project of 
mine, I was generating the source files only on one platform (Linux) and 
was then using them on OSX and Windows as well which worked fine.
I'm not sure if the sources are available in svn, but if they are not, I 
would rather ask the author if he could make them available instead of 
trying to generate them myself.

As to step 3, there is a setup.py script but it looked a bit short and 
the build instructions mention another build script, so maybe this one 
requires some customization (here I would recommend trying to get a 
proper setup script done which can then also be used to create binaries 
on every platform).

I haven't tried running any Ogre stuff (C++ or Python) on OSX so far 
which is why I can't say if step 1 will really be that straightforward 
(to me, that step is the critical one that could easily consume large 
amounts of time whereas step 3 should hopefully be more straightforward).
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to do get my hands dirty on this 
project (even though it would be nice to have the bindings available), 
but if you manage to get a build out (and it runs on Tiger), I will play 
around with it and test it. So, good luck! :)

Cheers,

- Matthias -