[Pythonmac-SIG] Package installation

[Bob Ippolito]

On Apr 18, 2005, at 12:51 PM, Lee Cullens wrote:

>
> On Apr 18, 2005, at 12:09 PM, Dethe Elza wrote:
>
>> <snip>
>>   Another low-tech solution would be to start a wiki page with known 
>> latest versions, urls to download the latest versions, and the above 
>> script.  No reinvention of the wheel needed, just leveraging what we 
>> already have in a different way.
>
> Isn't this what Bob is doing with http://pythonmac.org/packages/

More or less, minus the script, and any metadata beyond the canonical 
URL, name, and version.

> Being new to this "playground" my concern is the next round of 
> versions since they will likely be applicable by the time I get really 
> productive.  Say if Apple goes to 2.4 then what about Bob's build, and 
> subsequently Bob's(?) 2.5 (__future__) build?

Unless you explicitly screw things up by setting PYTHONPATH or running 
stuff with the wrong python interpreter, then what Apple does and what 
other people do are completely separate.  The build bugs were fixed in 
Python 2.3.5 and Python 2.4.1.  Of course, since 10.3 ships with 2.3.0, 
then it needs to be patched (PantherPythonFix).

That said, on Mac OS X 10.3+ builds of things, the extensions are 
actually portable amongst Python interpreters of the same version since 
they don't directly link to a Python library... so it would be possible 
to share the same set of extensions between two Python 2.3.x (though 
I'm not sure why you would want to have two Python 2.3.x installed in 
the first place).

> I for one would like a more transparent and manageable versioning.  I 
> don't want to move things around (I'll play by the rules), but I would 
> like to be able to add new versions and remove old versions of Python 
> and components combined.  As I understand it, such is what Bob did 
> with 2.4, but what he did is not overly obvious to me (I understand 
> Bob is working within the conventions and constraints of the Mac OS X  
> implementation) and the additional learning curve distracts from the 
> finished app package (at my age without the time of youth one gets 
> more focused :~).

I didn't do anything special, I built Python 2.4.1, unmodified.  The 
problems in the past were bugs in Python that have been squashed.

-bob