[Pythonmac-SIG] Future 64-bit installers

[Ned Deily]

In article <44F47665-6748-41BF-A4E3-64AE5D88DA39 at mac.com>,
 Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
> We had a short discussion on the 2.7-macosx10.5 installer for python 2.7 at 
> the europython language summit due to the unfortunate problems with IDLE and 
> Tkinter in that installer: tkinter doesn't work in 64-bit due to being linked 
> with Tk 8.4 and for some reason IDLE.app doesn't work either (even though 
> that worked earlier in the develpment process).
> 
> The consensus at the summit was to replace the macosx10.5 installer (ppc, 
> x86, x86_64) by a macosx10.6 (x86, x86_64) installer for future releases. 
> That enables linking with Tk 8.5 and that would solve a number of issues 
> other than being available in 64-bit code.

It will also solve the problem of needless compilation of PPC code on 
10.6 when building extension modules and removing any requirements to 
build 3-way versions of 3rd-party libraries.

I think this is the right solution (and the one I suggested here last 
fall).  Due to the dropping of support of PPC machines in 10.6 and the 
moving to default 64-bit, it still seems to me that there is a natural 
gap between 10.5 and 10.6 and much more natural to draw a line between 
them.
 
> Users of OSX 10.5 (or earlier) can still use the macosx10.3 installer, that 
> would stay the same. The only difference for OSX 10.5 users is that they 
> cannot use 64-bit code without building their own binaries.

... which is the way things had always been up to the 2.7 release.  And 
clearly as time goes on, the use of 10.5 in general and 64-bit on 10.5 
will continue to drop.  Nothing changes for the G5 (ppc64) users who are 
stuck with 10.5, in any case, since the 2.7 installer doesn't include 
ppc64.
 
> The alternative to raising the OSX requirement is to ship Tk 8.5 in the 
> installer and that would grow the installer, and would increase my load.

Not a good idea!

> P.S. It should be possible to use the future macosx10.6 installer to install 
> on 10.5 as well if you install Tk 8.5 yourself, but this won't be prominently 
> advertised.

I'm not sure that will work unless you continue to supply other things 
like openssl that have been upgraded in OS X between 10.5 and 10.6.  
It's probably a bad idea to set any expectations of that.  The message 
should be: "if you want Tk 8.5 or 64-bit on 10.5, build it yourself.  Or 
use MacPorts."  Keep it simple!

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org