[Pythonmac-SIG] Python Eggs and Mac OS version compatibility

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 19-jul-2005, at 16:56, Kevin Dangoor wrote:
>
> That's where I need some help, because I don't know for certain what
> the compatibility rules are. From reading this list for the past
> several months, I have an idea:
>
> 1) an extension built for Python 2.4 on 10.3 should work under 10.4
> 2) an extension built for Python 2.4 on 10.4 might work on 10.3, but
> don't count on it.
>
> Would it then make sense for setuptools to do something like this:
>
> - declare the platform as it does now (eg, darwin-8.2.0)
> - specify that an egg is compatible if it's major version (8) is <=
> your machine's major version.
>
> Are there other compatibility gotchas or would that do the trick?

The kernel release (e.g. 8.2.0) isn't very interesting. Luckily the  
kernel version increases in sync with the OS version at the moment,  
which means your suggestion works just fine in practice. I wouldn't  
worry about the semantic difference between kernel versions and OS  
releases at the moment.

To make live even more interesting, that may change in the  
future :-). The developer tools have an SDK feature, this makes it  
possible to build software on 10.4 that will run reliably on an  
earlier version of the OS. Python's build system currently doesn't  
support this (aka "autoconf sucks"), but that will probably change in  
the future.

Ronald