[Python-Dev] OS X Installer for 3.0.1 and supported versions (original) (raw)

Ronald Oussoren ronaldoussoren at mac.com
Sat Feb 14 18:44:56 CET 2009

On 14 Feb, 2009, at 13:05, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

2. Release an installer built for 10.4 and higher. pros: one size fits all cons: no 64-bit support, known bugs in 10.4 wrt locale support, etc Why is it that such an installer couldn't include 64-bit support? Wouldn't 10.4 just ignore architectures it doesn't know about? Also, didn't 10.4 already support ppc64?

10.4 only supported 64-bit code for a very limited number of system
libraries, basicly just enough to support running 64-bit number
crunching code. System-wide support for 64-bit code was added in 10.5.

A single installer could support both 32-bit on 10.4 and 64-bit on
10.5, but I don't think that's very useful because there are changes
in the low-level unix API's that could result in different behaviour
of a 32-bit and 64-bit script on the same system. In general 10.5 has
much saner Unix API's than earlier releases.

So, to summarize, I will build and test installer images for 3.0.1 built for 10.4+ and for 10.5+ and will make them available, if there is interest. If someone else is planning on making official installer(s), I'd be happy to pass along my experiences so far. In any case, I strongly urge that the minimum support level be 10.4. I still wish there were 10.3+ installers that also include 64-bit code. I don't get it why that can't be technically possible.

The problem with 10.3 support is that we need volunteers to actually investigate and fix issues that only occur on 10.3 systems. I cannot be that volunteer because I no longer have access to systems that are capable of running 10.3.

That said, the difference between a binary capable of running on 10.4+ and one running 10.3+ is minimal. I introduced weak-linking for a number of symbols that are not present on 10.3.9 in the 2.5 timeframe and that could should continue to work in the future. I won't notice when someone introduces additional calls to functions not available on 10.3 though.

Ronald

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