On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 07:36:25AM +0200, "Martin v. L?wis" wrote: > >> In a wider sense of "to support", MacOS is certainly supported by > >> Python. There is everything in the source code that you need to make > >> Python run on a Mac. Just download the sources and compile them yourself. > >> > > And yet we don't regard the Windows release as complete until you have > > built the binaries (for which service you deserve many thanks, by the way). > > This phenomenon exists for a lot of other systems, as well. For example, > we also support Solaris, but stopped providing Solaris binaries since > Python 1.5 (when I last built binaries for Das Python-Buch). People > still can get Solaris binaries from ActiveState or Sunfreeware; Sun also > ships Python as part of the system.
I personally think the Mac is pretty important, as one of the big three consumer operating systems... > > Is the Mac platform one on which users will be happy to compile from > > source? I know its users are savvier than Windows users, and have a > > better tool set available to them, but they still seem to expect > > downloadable installers. > > The major difference in the "do it yourself" attitude is that Mac user > get a compiler for free, as part of the operating system release, > whereas for Windows, they have to pay for it (leaving alone VS Express > for the moment). Actually, I think the more pernicious factor is that a version of Python comes pre-installed on Mac OS X, which means the up-front demand is lower for a pre-compiled version. This is problematic, though, because that version of Python only gets upgraded with full releases of Mac OS X (which are not very well correlated with releases of Python, of course). So we have lots of Python installs out there that, in the absence of a precompiled binary version, can't be upgraded without installing the developer tools. > However, the real difference is motivation for contribution to open > source projects. You normally contribute to scratch an itch. > Unfortunately, these binaries don't come out such a motiviation. So the > release manager roles are either altruistic, or rely on extrinsic > motivations (money, reputation). I don't know what to do about motivation but if there are barriers that we can lower, please let me know. cheers, --titus -- C. Titus Brown, c...@msu.edu _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
