[Distutils] [setuptools] setuptools and fat binaries

[Ronald Oussoren]

Hi,

Apple supports fat binaries on Mac OS X (they call them universal  
binaries), that is binaries that contain executable code for multiple  
architectures. In released version of the os this can be used to  
build binaries and libraries that support both PPC and PPC64  
architectures, which isn't used very much, and in the future this  
will be the mechanism to support both the current PPC based systems  
and the to-be-introduced intel systems with a single binary.

I'm currently playing around with Python on an Intel developer system  
(my goal is a patch that will make it easy to build a fat/universal  
build of Python on Mac OS X), and I wondering how setuptools (and  
specifically eggs) can support universal binaries. The reason I ask  
is because of eggs that contain extensions, whose name contains the  
architecture, such as aem-0.10.0-py2.4-macosx-10.4-ppc.egg. Just  
using two eggs, one for each architecture, would work but seems  
wasteful and would make it harder to create self fat application  
bundles.

Ronald