It's not Python that's the issue, it's the C++ Visual module which (until the very recent work) had three C++ components (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) for creating windows and handling events.
On the Mac, the problem is that it has often happened that a minor operating system upgrade made something in our supposedly standard Mac-specific code break, or Tcl is broken so the lightweight Idle IDE won't work, or some damn thing. A particularly dramatic example is pulling the plug on the Carbon framework, with the effect that VPython, with a rather conventional architecture that continues to work on Windows and Linux, could not run on Cocoa, which requires that Cocoa call VPython, whereas the API of VPython requires essentially that VPython call Cocoa. (Hence the recent major effort to restructure VPython in a fundamental way while preserving its API.) On Ubuntu Linux, the problem is that very often some library is broken by a release, and one must hunt and hunt for some scrap of information that tells you how to make things work again. We don't include Python in our installers; we tell people to install Python first before using our installer. This is true even on the Mac. It is true that Python comes with the Mac, but the Apple version is crippled, and there is general agreement that if you're actually going to use Python yourself on a Mac you should install a Python from python.org. A hoped-for benefit of the change to base VPython on wxPython (which is a wrapper for the cross-platform GUI framework wxWidgets) is that this will insulate VPython from the continual upheavals in the Mac and Linux environments. Bruce On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Joshua Thorp <jth...@redfish.com> wrote: > Interesting, but the big difference here would be that Mac and Linux come > with python installed where windows doesn't. So updating windows isn't > likely to have as big an impact, since presumably you are including python > in you windows installer and not in you mac or linux one. Or am I wrong? > > --joshua > > >
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