Re: Optional BSD package is required for (useable) Python?

On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 04:18:31PM -0400, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> > I really don't think it's a big deal to simply tell the naive users 
> > who
> > go out of their way to deselect the BSD layer that they screwed up and
> > now they have to install it if they want to use your software.  It's
> > not that hard to determine the presence of the BSD layer.

I think this condescending language about users "screwing up" their 
MacOS X installation by leaving out the BSD subsystem is a little bit 
bizarre and unprofessional.  If it's an optional install, then Apple 
clearly disagrees with that point of view (as do I).

On May 11, 2004, at 4:26 PM, Nicholas Riley wrote:
> So why can't packaged apps use the bundle Python too?  From some of
> the other emails I got the idea that Python was unusable without the
> BSD layer installed,

There's a python startup script in the package created by 
bundle-builder that sets a couple of environment variables and invokes 
python to run the bundled script.  It is solely in order to run this 
script that the BSD environment needs to be installed.  It could easily 
be replaced with a /bin/sh script if it was considered important to 
support users who didn't have /usr/bin/python installed already.  
That's the only change that would be required.

The last time I brought this up, Bob Ippolito explained that this would 
make it impossible to use the bundled app as a "regular" app from both 
the Finder and the command line, but I never really appreciated that 
point.  It sounded like bundle-builder2 would eliminate the problem in 
a more robust way, so it didn't seem worth pursuing.  But, if I was 
going to ship an app based on the current bundle-builder, I would 
definitely hack it to use a shell startup script instead of the python 
script.

Tom Pollard


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