[issue11229] Make the Mac installer more like the Windows installer

[Ronald Oussoren]

Ronald Oussoren added the comment:

BTW. There is a completely different way for distributing Python: drop the entire installer and provide a zipfile containing a single application bundle.

The most likely target for the application is IDLE, with a new menu item for making the command-line tools available (see editors like Textmate and BBEdit for a precedent, or even Xcode).

The advantage of a single application bundle is that you don't have to have an installer, users can just drag&drop for installation *and deinstallation*. An added advantage is that there are third party
libraries that make it easy to (auto-)update applications, the 
"check for updates" menu in a lot of Mac apps is based on an opensource
library that could be used here is well.

There are some disadvatages as well:

* It is different than how Python is currently distributed, any
  change will upset some people

* If there's a single application bundle you cannot easily add
  Python Launcher (although it could be hidden inside the toplevel app)

* At least some people will be upset by having to start IDLE at all,
  even if it would only be used to make the command-line tools available

* Someone will have to do the work :-)

I intentionally don't list the Mac App store as an advantage or disadvantage, primarily because the app store requires sandboxing and that would make no sense for a general programming tool (a sandboxed version of IDLE app could be used to start scripts, but those scripts would be in the sandbox as well and hence couldn't access most of the system).

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue11229>
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