On 1/22/10 8:06 PM, Charles Hartman wrote:
Your mouth to gods' ears. How much I wish someone had both the expertise (not me that's
for sure) and the time to take over what is after all *the only way for ordinary
Mac-Python dopes like me to make a distributable application*! Isn't this bad for the
Python community, the cause of Python, etc? Or substitute "Mac" in those
phrases?
But it isn't the only way.
http://wiki.python.org/moin/MacPython/BundleBuilder
I've switched back to BundleBuilder, and it works fine. It takes a bit
of trial and error to get everything wrapped up, but I've never
understood why people bad-mouthed it so much. It's a single-script
module, and reasonably easy to understand, and relatively easy to
modify: anyone with a reasonably amount of Python skill can get it
working. I just used it today to release a fully 64-bit, four-way
universal build of one of my commercial/shareware Python apps.
py2app may be more powerful than BundleBuilder, but it is also a
complex, fragile beast. It consists of several different packages,
requiring both a) a deep understanding of OS X mach-o internals and how
libraries/load paths/dyld bits are loaded; and b) a deep understanding
of Python internals, i.e. object graphs, etc. It's so complicated that
there are only two developers in the Python community that I'm aware of
who actually understand it: its original author, Bob Ippolito, who has
abandoned it; and the current MacPython maintainer, Ronald Oussoren, who
is also the only current maintainer of PyObjC, and who does all this
stuff in his spare time. (i.e. he has limited time, and many demands on
that time).
In other words, py2app is now essentially unmaintained, and is starting
to suffer from bit-rot. I certainly don't plan to stake my own
development platform on it anymore.
This isn't a criticism of anyone. Bob has gone on to bigger and better
things as the co-founder of his own company, and Ronald's efforts as
MacPython maintainer are absolutely essential: his limited time is
focused exactly where it needs to be, on general Python/Mac issues and
on PyObjC. However, the absence of a maintainer for py2app is real, and
that doesn't portend well for its future.
I'd encourage others to take another look at BundleBuilder. It works
fine with Python 2.x, and I see no reason why it can't work with Python
3.x, with some modification (it's removed from 3.x). When I move my own
platform to Python 3.x in the future, I will likely start a separate
BundleBuilder 3.x project.
--Kevin
--
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com
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