[Python-Dev] Fwd: Broken link to download (Mac OS X) (original) (raw)

Zvezdan Petkovic zvezdan at zope.com
Thu Apr 15 00:12:07 CEST 2010

On Apr 14, 2010, at 4:40 PM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

I think you just need to supply to configure

MACOSXDEPLOYMENTTARGET=10.4 and have the appropriate SDK installed with Xcode. Wouldn't that break 10.3 compatibility (seel below)?

I was replying to your point about 10.4 build. Naturally, if you want a 10.3 build you'd pass 10.3 as the target and would have to have appropriate Xcode SDK installed.

Unfortunately, Apple manages to break compatibility and portability with every release, which makes this particular build task soooo tricky. You have to make all kinds of decisions and compromises where are really difficult to keep track of.

Hmm. Apple provided compatibility SDK and documented it. The only compromise I see in this build process right now is that we are building a Panther (10.3) compatible installer, while Mac OS X is a certified UNIX starting with 10.5. I think there are more issues. People want a fat binary that supports AMD64 along with x86, yet building such a binary requires an SDK that won't support PPC anymore - right?

Yes.

x86_64, i386, and ppc are supported even in the Xcode supplied with the latest Mac OS X 10.6. Only ppc64 is not. So, ppc is not an issue.

The problem is that enforcing backward compatibility with 10.3 and 10.4 makes 64-bit Intel architecture not feasible.

You are right, it is a compromise. We are making more users happy by providing a 32-bit installer for a wider range of OS releases.

However, if we want a more modern certified UNIX, 64-bit installer, then we'll have to draw a line and stop supporting older OS releases.

Just as we stop supporting older releases of Python.

Regards,

Zvezdan

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list