[Distutils] [setuptools] setuptools and fat binaries

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jan 4, 2006, at 12:51 PM, Ronald Oussoren wrote:

> 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.

Using two or three eggs doesn't really make it any harder to create  
an application bundle, py2app needs to change to support eggs anyway  
and having a separate arch egg would work fine.  It might be better  
that way because it's easy to see which packages support which  
architectures and it's easy for someone who has the relevant platform  
to built, test, and upload.

py2app could even merge arch eggs together to make them fat at build  
time.  The only thing that's off is that easy_install would need to  
fetch eggs for all architectures... maybe a pydistutils.cfg that says  
you want to fetch "ppc ppc64 x86".

-bob