> Unless you're a unix person, there's very few useful things you can
> do with Python 2.3 sans third party extensions
Ah, I think I'm beginning to understand all the confusion.
MacOS X is the largest-selling UNIX distro in the world. Linux and
Solaris people are deserting in droves and moving to Apple machines
running OS X. There's a huge and growing population of Unix people
using Macs. So this ("unix person") is a non-negligible audience.
May even be a majority of Mac users by now.
Full disclosure: I'm a UNIX person. The first thing I do when I get a
new Mac is make sure X11 is installed on it, and in my Login Items.
The second thing I do is build an X11 version of GNU Emacs from the
CVS repository. I don't mind the Terminal's oddities because I never
use it; all my shells are in Emacs shell buffers. I rarely use the
Finder; it seems a fairly dorky program. But I like the Mac as a very
nice UNIX platform with cute visual glitz.
I pretty much never write Mac-specific code. For me, the supplied
Python works pretty well; I can't write past Python 2.3 anyway (though
I'd like to), because there are lots of machines in my target
population that still aren't running 2.4, so I have to be
conservative. Just going to 2.3 is a bit daring -- you have to check
to see where it is in the Debian packaging chain, for instance.
A great deal of my code works with just the basic Python and stdlib.
Sometimes I need to require PIL or reportlab or Medusa. And on the
Mac, just unpacking the sources for those extensions and then saying
"python setup.py install" (in a shell) works just fine. The
additional complexity of installing packages and eggs seems overkill.
I can see that if you are a pre-MacOSX Mac person, used to all the
groundbreaking UI complexity of Apple in the 80's and 90's, your view
and your needs might be different. Or if you are a for-Mac developer.
But most people aren't.
Bill
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