On Feb 8, 2006, at 1:06 AM, Kevin Ollivier wrote: >> In addition, if you have your code running just fine and dandy under >> Apple's python, then you upgrade to 10.5, chances are that your app >> will >> no longer work, as Apple is likely to yank their python out from >> under >> you. > > What do you mean by this? None of my Panther scripts stopped working > under Tiger (I do have a couple ;-), and I didn't even touch Python > 2.4 on Mac until around October, where they still worked as they > always did on 2.3. Why should I now assume 10.5 is going to break all > my apps?
Unless you're a unix person, there's very few useful things you can do with Python 2.3 sans third party extensions (especially on Panther, where wx and tkinter were not shipped). All of those extensions, or at least a .pth hack if you just did an upgrade, need to be installed to keep that working. Applications built with py2app or bundlebuilder are even worse off. Mac OS X 10.5 will surely ship with at least 2.4.2, which means all extensions built against any previous vendor Python will break, period. Additionally, all of the WASTE-based stuff (the shipping Python IDE, the worthless PackageManager, etc.) is incompatible with i386. Only the most basic mostly platform independent scripts are going to work with Mac OS X 10.5. If a third party Python is used, it will work forever... or at least as long as Apple maintains basic API compatibility with the version of the OS it was built with (whether through emulation or otherwise). I have Python applications built on Mac OS X 10.2 that work on i386 Mac OS X 10.4 because they used a third party Python. If those applications had depended on /usr/bin/python and extensions linked against it, then it would be toast -- especially because bundlebuilder doesn't have a PPC bootstrap. bundlebuilder-built applications (assuming semi-standalone), without Info.plist changes, will launch with an i386 Python and almost definitely won't work at all unless they don't include any extensions at all. If we do strongly recommend that only third party builds of Python are used, then we don't have to say "I told you so" to as many people when their apps break a year or two later. The package database and the documentation also become shorter and more maintainable if only recent third party builds are supported. There will be much less confusion if there's one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to use Python on Mac OS X. Given these caveats and limited resources, the vendor Python is absolutely irrelevant as far as I am concerned. If someone wants to deal with separate support and documentation for what ships with Mac OS X 10.3, Mac OS X 10.4, and Mac OS X 10.5 then have fun, but I am NOT interested in that. -bob _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
