[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: Pythonmac-SIG Digest, Vol 20, Issue 24 (original) (raw)

Jon Schull jschull at digitalgoods.com
Mon Dec 20 14:30:17 CET 2004

Thanks for the replies

Jon said

The problem of multiple pythons on OSX is really really crippling. I use visual python (which requires X which requires one python) and I want to work in and run with the standard OS X look and feel.

I spend literally hours every month or two trying (unsuccessfully) to get the various systems to co-exist and the result is not pretty. At the moment, idle doesn't work anywhere, at all. Here's the tip of my iceberg. Suggestions welcome. 208-186-56-189:~ jis$ idle -bash: /sw/lib/python2.3/idlelib/idle.py: Permission denied 208-186-56-189:~ jis$ sudo idle Password: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/sw/bin/idle", line 3, in ? from idlelib.PyShell import main File "/sw/src/root-python23-2.3.4-2/sw/lib/python2.3/idlelib/PyShell.py", line 11, in ? File "/sw/lib/python2.3/threading.py", line 13, in ? from traceback import printexc as printexc ImportError: cannot import name printexc

Bob replied

There is definitely something wrong with your Fink installation of Python, which probably has no relevance to having multiple Python installations. I stay miles away from Fink, because terrible things have happened every time I've tried it, so I don't know what the problem is specifically. It's especially troubling to see that "idle" and "sudo idle" has different behavior. I suggest reporting these issues to the relevant maintainers for the Fink packages. That permission denied error looks like something is missing a +x and/or the "idle" shell script is not correct

For what it's worth, I haven't had any such problems with Darwinports and its Python... however, VPython isn't available from Darwinports at this time, so it's probably not of much use to you yet. -bob

I'll look for the Fink maintainers. For what its worth I came across a seemingly related set of issues last night while trying to get apache to run python cgis. Our solution was to rewrite the #! lines as #! /sw/bin/env /sw/bin/python (the magic was in adding the first phrase). Related discusssion and alternative solutions is at
http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/wiki/TracOnOsx

Jon said

The ideal would of course be a single python. But failing that would be a single installer that would put in place the two (or even more) pythons needed in a manner that allowed one to work and install new modules as needed, without risking obscure disasters.

Jack said

This is a known problem, which is explained in Mac/OSX/Dist/README:

Currently (November 2003) there is still a bug in the build procedure for $DESTROOT builds: building some of the applets will fail (in Mac/OSX/Makefile) if you don't have the same version of Python installed normally. So before doing the distribution you should build and install a framework Python in the normal way. Unfortunately, the problem is rather difficult to fix. buildapplet (or py2app, or similar tools) will need to be told that we're in a destroot install situation, so that if it wants filenames it should use the non-destrooted version but if it actually needs the data that's in the files it should use the destrooted filename. I can live with the current workaround for MacPython installers, if it's a problem for darwinports file a bugreport and a solution may be available sooner:-) -- Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen at cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman

Jon sighs... Unfortunate indeed. You can live with it, and I don't even understand your explanation. ;-/

Its ironic that the python community values such elegance in the language yet tolerates such complexity in context. I presume that's because there's no alternative.

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