How to decouple non-GUI stuff from the GUI?

Hi,

Weighing in on the Mac build issue:

- The only GUI backends worth building on Mac OS X are TkAgg and the
native macosx one, in my humble opinion. Sticking to them will prevent
the kind of pain Kynn described. These backends are autodetected by
default during the build process and you only land in trouble if you
explicitly enable the rest. My suggestion is therefore to do the
default "python setup.py install".

- I have been successfully using the Apple "system" Python since Mac
OS 10.5 to run numpy/scipy/matplotlib/ipython and never encountered
any major build or usage problems. I agree that Mac OS 10.4 and
earlier needed a Python reinstallation, but do not see why it is
currently still a strong requirement. Ben, do you know off-hand what
issues numpy has been having with Apple Python?

As improved documentation I can contribute (yet another :-)) tutorial
for building and installing matplotlib and friends on a clean Mac OS
10.6 system, with a minimum of downloaded packages and using the
standard system stuff as far as possible. I fine-tuned the
instructions on several iMacs at work. I will just check that it still
works with the latest packages.

Regards,
Ludwig

···

Message: 4
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:57:10 -0600
From: Benjamin Root <ben.root@...553...>

There are a variety of issues depending on your Mac system that needs to be
sorted out to determine the best way to go about installing everything. The
particular sticking point is that Apple supplied their own interperater
rather than the standard python interpreater. Unfortunately, this causes
problems with numpy (and thus matplotlib).

- The only GUI backends worth building on Mac OS X are TkAgg and the
native macosx one, in my humble opinion.

wx works just fine on OS-X, though I'm pretty sure it's no longer a build-time dependency (no compiled code)

- I have been successfully using the Apple "system" Python since Mac
OS 10.5 to run numpy/scipy/matplotlib/ipython and never encountered
any major build or usage problems. I agree that Mac OS 10.4 and
earlier needed a Python reinstallation, but do not see why it is
currently still a strong requirement.

I'm not sure how strong, and I don't know about numpy issues, but there are some other key issues:

1) not a native readline
2) Apple has NEVER updated any of their Python installs
3) You can't re-distribute it (py2app)
4) I thought there was a TK issue, but I'm not a TK user.
5) It'll only work on a given OS-X version (i.e. you can't distribute a binary that will work on multiple versions of OS-X -- at least not older ones)

Anyway, for years, the MacPython community has tried to establish a standard for the binaries that people build -- Python on the Mac is something of a nightmare, what with Apple's Python, python.org's build, fink, macports, etc....

The ONLY reasonable versions to build binaries for are the python.org builds, unless you want to build a LOT of different binaries. Note that Robin Dunn has managed to build wxPython binaries that work on both python.org and Apple pythons -- neat trick, that -- but not many people seem to want to do that kludge.

As improved documentation I can contribute (yet another :-)) tutorial
for building and installing matplotlib and friends on a clean Mac OS
10.6 system, with a minimum of downloaded packages and using the
standard system stuff as far as possible.

That would still be nice -- I'm still not sure if you can count on X11 being installed, though -- do you know?

-Chris

···

On 12/14/10 11:25 PM, Ludwig Schwardt wrote:

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