[Pythonmac-SIG] Building plans .....

[Ronald Oussoren]

> On 13 Mar 2020, at 20:36, Christopher Barker <pythonchb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> There is a private API that makes it possible to use GUI libraries outside of an app bundle and that’s used by a number of projects, but I wouldn’t want to use that in Python.
> 
> Is that what TK is doing? 

I don’t know.
> 
> And while probably not good to build it into Python itself, what about building into the GUI toolkits? 
> 
> Do you have a reference to that API?

I don’t have a reference handy, it has come up before either on this list or the python tracker (years back). IIRC someone found the API by checking how the bundled java VM managed to use GUI APIs without being in an app bundle.

Apple is clearly preferring application code packaged as app bundles, and effectively doesn’t care about traditional Unix-y use of macOS. The need for an app bundle when using frameworks is just one example of that. Another example are the issues that keep popping up when trying to use Apple frameworks in child processes after calling os.fork(). 

Because of this I don’t think it is worthwhile to try to work around this limitation by calling private APIs. That’s even before considering use cases that involve distributing code through the macOS app store.

Ronald
—

Twitter: @ronaldoussoren
Blog: https://blog.ronaldoussoren.net/

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