[gdal-dev] GDAL 1.5.0 Beta2 Released
Christopher Barker
Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
Tue Dec 11 15:49:34 EST 2007
William Kyngesburye wrote:
> You mean Tiger and Leopard, right?
no, you'd listed leopard twice, so I got confused, but I think I got it now.
> It's not only a split of Universal Python vs. Leopard Python, but also a
> purely Tiger/Leopard issue.
right. I think I got that.
> I went the route of building explicitly and separately for each system version.
> It's easier to compile that way, and to install.
well, yes and no. If you are building a 10.4 (I get confused as to which
cat is older than which -- at least Ubuntu puts their animals in
alphabetical order!) compatible version, then a 10.5 one is just extra
work -- which is fine if you are doing it!
> I'm not sure what the problem is with Leopard's Python, if any.
Partly it depends on how you want to use it. For one, I often need to
build py2app's bundles for re-distribution -- if I use the 10.4
Universal Framework build, then I cover a lot of bases.
> There
> was some debate about it on the python list, but I don't remember any
> serious real issues (but then, a lot of the extensions that were
> discussed aren't of interest to me).
Well, these are the ones I know of:
- no readline
- weird mixture of 32/64 bit quad libs and 32bit libs (though I don't
think that breaks anything)
- They've got their own packages somewhere other than site-packages,
so strange things happen when you try to add packages they already
installed. You could also potentially break something of theres if you
upgrade something.
> I trust Apple to stay with Python
> 2.5 thru the life of the OS version and not break things with a future
> 2.6 switch,
yes.
> and to fix current problems.
No. AFAIK, they have never updated ANYTHING in python within a version,
even things that were definitively broken.
> It looks to me like their
> python binaries are more than just something for the system to use (as
> supposed by many python users), and meant for people to run complex
> Python applications on.
Well, their intentions aside:
- all the extra modules are a major moving target (numpy is old,
wxPython is old, etc, etc, etc)
- Python has no built-in versioning support for packages
- Apple has never upgraded anything within an OS version
- Even between versions, I can run stuff built for the 10.4 build of
Python on 10.5 -- if I rely on the 10.5 version, it probably won't run
on 10.6, when they will probably upgrade stuff.
- It's a lot of work to support all this -- that's why the PythonMac
community has generally tried (not very successfully!) to declare an
"official" supported version -- that version is still the 10.4 Universal
Framework Build of Python2.5.
> I guess I'll see what happens when I try the GRASS python GUI on Leopard...
yup.
Anyway, If you're going to do anything -- please support the 10.4
python. Beyond that, anything else you do is gravy -- and believe me, I
appreciate it all.
> Actually, the windows eggs DO need an external gdal.
hmm, that's unfortunate -- again -- it makes me want a Linux style
package manager!
> Not to mention format plugins and MANY
> dependencies that would bloat the python binaries.
Oh well, I guess it's just too much to hope that you can keep something
like this simple -- it does make your framework installers look pretty good!
I've had my say -- and you're doing the work, so do what you think is best.
Thanks again,
-Chris
--
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
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