[Pythonmac-SIG] py2app annoyance

[Kevin Walzer]

On 1/22/10 8:06 PM, Charles Hartman wrote:

>
> Your mouth to gods' ears.  How much I wish someone had both the expertise (not me that's for sure) and the time to take over what is after all *the only way for ordinary Mac-Python dopes like me to make a distributable application*!  Isn't this bad for the Python community, the cause of Python, etc?  Or substitute "Mac" in those phrases?
>

But it isn't the only way.

http://wiki.python.org/moin/MacPython/BundleBuilder

I've switched back to BundleBuilder, and it works fine. It takes a bit 
of trial and error to get everything wrapped up, but I've never 
understood why people bad-mouthed it so much. It's a single-script 
module, and reasonably easy to understand, and relatively easy to 
modify: anyone with a reasonably amount of Python skill can get it 
working. I just used it today to release a fully 64-bit, four-way 
universal build of one of my commercial/shareware Python apps.

py2app may be more powerful than BundleBuilder, but it is also a 
complex, fragile beast. It consists of several different packages, 
requiring both a) a deep understanding of OS X mach-o internals and how 
libraries/load paths/dyld bits are loaded; and b) a deep understanding 
of Python internals, i.e. object graphs, etc. It's so complicated that 
there are only two developers in the Python community that I'm aware of 
who actually understand it: its original author, Bob Ippolito, who has 
abandoned it; and the current MacPython maintainer, Ronald Oussoren, who 
is also the only current maintainer of PyObjC, and who does all this 
stuff in his spare time. (i.e. he has limited time, and many demands on 
that time).

In other words, py2app is now essentially unmaintained, and is starting 
to suffer from bit-rot. I certainly don't plan to stake my own 
development platform on it anymore.

This isn't a criticism of anyone. Bob has gone on to bigger and better 
things as the co-founder of his own company, and Ronald's efforts as 
MacPython maintainer are absolutely essential: his limited time is 
focused exactly where it needs to be, on general Python/Mac issues and 
on PyObjC.  However, the absence of a maintainer for py2app is real, and 
that doesn't portend well for its future.

I'd encourage others to take another look at BundleBuilder. It works 
fine with Python 2.x, and I see no reason why it can't work with Python 
3.x, with some modification (it's removed from 3.x). When I move my own 
platform to Python 3.x in the future, I will likely start a separate 
BundleBuilder 3.x project.

--Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com