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

Ronald Oussoren ronaldoussoren at mac.com
Sat Feb 14 19:53:37 CET 2009

On 14 Feb, 2009, at 19:04, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

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. I don't get that. Why would the scripts behave differently on 10.5 depending on whether the Python interpreter is 32-bit or 64-bit? Surely, the Unix API does the same thing, whether invoked from 32-bit code, or 64-bit code, no?

I should have been more clear: the unix API for code that runs on 10.4 is slightly different than that for code that runs on 10.5+, Apple basiclly fixed a number of UNIX API-compliance issues in 10.5.

Those differences might affect the behaviour of the Python interpreter, and at least would make the configure stage even more involved for such a build, because several configure-checks give different output for MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4 and MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5.

I haven't checked yet if it is even possible to have a 64-bit binary that runs on 10.4 and 10.5.

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. I don't think it is necessary to actually test whether the binaries work on 10.3; I don't test the Windows installers on Windows 2000, either. For me, it's good enough if we believe that the installer "should" work on 10.3. Then, if somebody reports a problem, we can still consider what to do. If there are no reports, it either means there are no problems, or nobody uses it, or nobody bothers reporting the problems.

I'm not 100% happy with this, but I could live with this. As long as
Apple ships a 10.3 SDK I might even be able to check for unsupported API calls once in while.

Having thought a little more about the issues, I do think that we
should provide an installer that runs on as many systems as possible. As Guido noted
many people don't bother to upgrade, and I'd expect many schools to be that category as well (as an example of a type of organisation that's often
lacking in funding).

I need more time to think about the options, and I don't think there's
a reason to rush this and would prefer to discuss this issue at Pycon.

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