[Pythonmac-SIG] bdist_mpkg question: python 3 support?

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 17 Dec, 2012, at 19:03, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:

> Oops hit send by accident .
> 
> 
> On Dec 17, 2012, at 9:57 AM, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal
> <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> 
>> On Dec 17, 2012, at 1:34 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> You could port bdist_mpkg yourself, doing that should be too hard. That said, bdist_mpkg creates an old package format that doesn't support some of the more recent features of Installer.app (such as signed packages).
>>> 
>>> Another alternative is to use the packaging tools provided with Xcode, you will have to do more manually but will end up with a "modern" package format.
>> 
>> Do you think it would be hard to update bdist_mpkg to support the new
>> format? It is nice to have a simple, pure python, way to build a.
> 
> Binary installer.

I don't know, I haven't looked into that yet (but will likely do so for the python.org installers).  I don't even know if the new format is properly documented, with some luck its a closed binary format that can only be created using Apple's tools.

I don't care too much about having something like bdist_mpkg because it has only limited usefulness: installer.app has limited features (no uninstall, very limited upgrade features), and it is hard to support virtualenv using installer.app packages.

> 
>> 
>>> binary eggs and those don't require additional tools.
> 
> Binary eggs do require setup tools or distribute, though that's not
> too heavy a lift.

IIRC bdist_mpkg also uses setuptools, so that's not really a disadvantage here.  The real problem with binary eggs is that pip doesn't install them, and pip seems to be the new hotness w.r.t. package management at the moment. There is some discussion about a new format (see <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/>, but I'm not sure why that would be better than eggs (other than that it isn't a setuptools egg).

The packaging landscape for Python still sucks and that might not change anytime soon.

> 
> But setup tools used to get all confused by Universal binaries--has
> that been fixed? If not, it still may be easier to fix that than do a
> bdist_mpkg update.

Setuptools works just fine with universal binaries, and always has.  It does treat 'universal' like any other architecture though, which means it doesn't understand that a binary egg with x86_64 only will work just fine when you are on a x86_64 machine with a python framework that supports i386 and x86_64. Whether or not that is a problem depends on your usecase.

Ronald

> 
> Chris
> 
> 
> 
>>> Ronald
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> -- Russell
>>>> 
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