[Pythonmac-SIG] Could the MacOSX Python core be a framework?

[Colin Simmonds]

Tony Lownds wrote:

> By the way, on OS X, Tcl and Perl are NOT frameworks, does anyone know 
> why?

It's to make porting Unix software easier. Between the Public Beta and 
final release several packages were switched back from frameworks to 
being plain libraries (such as Tcl and zlib). It turned out that fixing 
the many packages dependent on them to link against the framework 
instead of a library was more effort than using a framework was worth. 
Using libraries instead of frameworks greatly increases the chance of 
random Unix software building with a minimum of needed changes.

According to a post Wilfredo Sanchez made on the Darwin Development 
mailing list, the standard policy now is to leave any pre-existing Unix 
packages as libraries for compatibility. New or OS X specific code 
should go in frameworks, I believe.

For Python, there probably isn't much value in keeping such Unix 
compatibility - there simply isn't as much software trying to build 
against a Python shared library as there is for Perl or Tcl. What little 
pain this would cause is easily outweighed by the benefits of having 
Python be a full-fledged peer with the higher levels of OS X.

Colin