[PyQt] question about installation best practices on OS X

[Robert Bobbson]

One thing you are going to find out is that Apple isn't the quickest on the draw with updating things like Python.  It's
only recently that they made a move to anything near the 2.6 line, so I
have long since given up on using the stock python if I'm interested in
being up to date version-wise.

With some reservation, I'll
recommend using something like macports to manage these things as they
are maintained up to date, and it takes care of dependencies and other
fun things like library paths, etc.  MacPorts sets things up in /opt.

The reason for the
reservation is that at the time I built PyQt and all the supporting
packages, none of them appeared to have a binary version available for Snow Leopard (this was ~2 weeks ago now).  So, that meant the source had to be
downloaded and built from scratch.  That took about 12 hours on a 2
year old MacBook Pro. 
That didn't include the hour or two of tweaking the source packages to
get around some errors and warnings that were slowing down the process
even further.  It brought back warm fuzzy feelings for the Gentoo box
that I just retired a little while ago.

As those source only
options are replaced with binary packages, you should see install
performance comparable to Debian/Ubuntu/RedHat and their package
management tools, with all the corresponding benefits of having a
framework keep track of versions and dependencies.

Even if you don't use macports for pyqt, you might consider it for managing a whole slew of other apps, just like you would on a linux box or a windows+cygwin box.

-Rob



----- Original Message ----
From: Darren Dale <dsdale24 at gmail.com>
To: William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos at kyngchaos.com>
Cc: PyQt Mailing List <pyqt at riverbankcomputing.com>
Sent: Mon, October 19, 2009 7:06:20 AM
Subject: Re: [PyQt] question about installation best practices on OS X

Excellent, thank you for the pointer.

May I request a feature? Could this be mentioned somewhere in the mac
README? Or would it be possible to add some logic to the mac
installation scripts to find where distutils installs packages by
default?

Darren

On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 11:04 PM, William Kyngesburye
<woklist at kyngchaos.com> wrote:
> By default (as you've noticed), SIP and PyQt install their binary
> executables in the framework.  This is fine for the python.org Python, but
> installing in the system frameworks is not quite proper.
>
> What I do for SIP and PyQt and the system python is specify a custom bin
> (and site-packages and other files) location in configuration:
>
> SIP:
>
> python configure.py -n -d /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages -b
> /usr/local/bin -e /usr/local/include -v /usr/local/share/sip --arch=i386 -s
> MacOSX10.6.sdk
>
> PyQt:
>
> export QTDIR=/Developer/Applications/Qt
> python configure.py -d /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages -b /usr/local/bin
> --use-arch=i386
>
>
> On Oct 18, 2009, at 8:29 PM, Darren Dale wrote:
>
>> I just recently started working with OS X, and was wondering if
>> someone could point me to some discussion about best practices for
>> installing Qt and PyQt. For example, today I installed the Qt-4.6 beta
>> dmg, but was surprised that symlinks to tools like designer were not
>> created on the path. Likewise, I installed the most recent sip and
>> PyQt4 snapshots, and after installing I was surprised that I could not
>> find utilities like pyuic4 on the path. I'm using the python that
>> shipped with snow leopard (2.6.1), and packages using distutils, like
>> numpy, scipy, matplotlib, Distribute and nose, all installed to
>> /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages, which I guess is where I want them,
>> as opposed to /System/Library/Frameworks/... but I think sip and PyQt4
>> installed into Frameworks. Is this intentional? Any advice from
>> seasoned os x veterans?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Darren
>> _______________________________________________
>> PyQt mailing list    PyQt at riverbankcomputing.com
>> http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/mailman/listinfo/pyqt
>
> -----
> William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
> http://www.kyngchaos.com/
>
> All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.
>
>
>

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