Building from source on Mac OS X

Tobias Wood <t.wood07@...567...> writes:

Out of curiosity, why is the 10.4 SDK specified and how? Is this part
of distutils? And why, even with the 10.4 SDK, is the resulting output
bundle called 10.3 fat?

I think Python remembers the compiler flags used to compile the Python
interpreter and uses them when compiling extensions. The downloadable
Python interpreter has been compiled with maximal compatibility in mind:
it's Universal (i.e., both ppc and i386), and probably works on any
version of OS X from 10.3.9 onwards.

I just compiled Python 2.6.2 myself on OS X 10.5, and it wasn't
difficult at all:

./configure --enable-framework
make
sudo make install
sudo chmod g+w /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/\
2.6/{bin,lib/python2.6/site-packages}

That last command is there to let me install further packages without
sudo. Installing numpy from numpy-1.3.0-py2.6-macosx10.5.dmg worked
well, and I had no problems compiling matplotlib. The resulting files
are of course specific to i386, OS X version 10.5, and probably some
libraries on my system, so they are not good for distribution, but I
seemed to avoid all the usual problems with compiling matplotlib.

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--
Jouni K. Sepp�nen