[SciPy-user] Enthon for the Mac

[Robert Kern]

Joe Cooper wrote:
> Hey Robert,
> 
> Perfect timing.  I'm in the midst of preparing a new Enthon for Windows 
> (and peripherally one for Fedora).  We should probably chat sometime 
> about making sure most things are roughly functionally 
> compatible/equivalent, so that folks writing tutorials and other docs 
> can just say "install Enthon for your OS".

Okay. My needs diverge a bit from yours, I think. The push for me to do 
this comes from the fact that people at my institution are beginning to 
use Python and are heavily invested in the Mac platform. The people I'm 
supporting with this will need recent CVS versions of some packages.

For MacEnthon at least, it may be worth having Stable and Unstable 
branches. I'm willing to cut a Stable MacEnthon that has versions which 
match Enthon for Windows if such versions work on the Mac. wxPython may 
be a big problem here; only the 2.5 series works acceptably well on the Mac.

> I had started in on the Enthon on OS X endeavor about six months ago, 
> but only a few packages ever came of it.  The packaging on Mac is quite 
> abyssmal, so there isn't much to be gained by handing off the packages I 
> did back then--you pretty much just have to build the software by hand, 
> and then push the pretty "Go" button and it all gets piled up together 
> into an archive.  I do have simple aap recipes for almost everything in 
> Enthon on Windows, which you might find useful in automating your 
> construction on Mac, since the concept is the same for the Wise 
> installer.  It's nicer to say "aap -vf scipy.aap" than to have to go 
> download all of the bits and pieces.

aap as in www.a-a-p.org? I'll have to take a look at that.

For distutils-using Python packages, Bob Ippolito has recently made a 
bdist_mpkg target that puts everything into nice meta-packages[1]. 
There's a bit of customization work that needs to be done to make 
everything work as Enthon.mpkg.

There is currently a package manager for Python packages on the Mac 
called PackMan[2]. It's not a particularly satisfying solution, and 
bdist_mpkg is intended to be the base of a new system. I hope the 
presence of MacEnthon will encourage development of the next generation 
of PackMan.

[1] http://svn.red-bean.com/bob/py2app/trunk
[2] http://www.python.org/packman

> On the Kiva, Chaco, Traits front, we'll want to rope Eric into a 
> conversation.  I think there are some outstanding issues with 
> integrating the SVN versions.

Kiva at least is relatively stable, and the SVN now includes working Mac 
support. The other two may be too unstable.

> One thing we're doing with the next version is to integrate IPython as 
> kind of the de facto interactive python.  There's a scipy config file 
> that works well and makes writing tutorials simpler, since it's possible 
> to preload all of the relevant modules.

-- 
Robert Kern
rkern at ucsd.edu

"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
  Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
   -- Richard Harter