On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 09:06:06AM -0800, Christopher Barker wrote: > Bill Janssen wrote: > > You missed the first part of my message, I think. The system version > > would be installed under /usr/libexec/, or some such place, not under > > /usr/bin/. > > That is a good idea, but how do we get Apple to do it?
So the end result is that the system Python (and Perl, Tcl, Ruby, ...) isn't visible? Yuck - as started earlier in this thread, there are plenty of people for whom the system Python 2.3.x is plenty usable. Not everyone creates bundled applications for redistribution, or needs Python 2.4. > Way back when Redhat used python1.5 with a bunch of added extensions for > its admen tools. All their tools had "usr/local/bin/env python" in the > #! line. This was a pain in the *&$^&%* when you wanted to upgrade your > standard python, just like it's a pin now with Apple. > > However, all they needed to do was put a darn version on the #! line: > > /usr/bin/env python1.5 > > Apple could do the same thing, then all their admin tools would be > insulated from adding additional, newer pythons anywhere on the PATH. What Apple does now, i.e. #!/usr/bin/python (see the contents of /usr/libexec/fax, for example), is better - what if you had a replacement Python 2.3 which didn't have Apple's CoreGraphics bindings in it, for example? It's not always going to be the case that Apple provides a Python version one major version behind the current one. Also, a lot of Apple's tools run from within a GUI context where the path is set by the loginwindow environment (~/.MacOSX/environment.plist), not by your shell initialization files, which makes absolute paths more attractive. They could use #!/usr/bin/python2.3, I guess... > NOTE: Even better would be a way to specify multiple versions in > order of preference, and a python launcher that would sort that out > for you. This would be particularly nice on Windows, where you can > only associate *.py with one thing. Maybe some day I'll want that > enough to write it! Apple does something similar with its Java launching mechanism; you can specify "exactly this JVM version" or "this major version" or "at least this version" and so forth in the Info.plist file. It'd be nice if Apple provided a standard way to handle versioning for any system-provided interpreter, though whatever they did would only be likely to apply to bundled applications, not command-line stuff. -- Nicholas Riley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley> _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig