[PyQt] question about installation best practices on OS X

[Darren Dale]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 9:50 PM, William Kyngesburye
<woklist at kyngchaos.com> wrote:
> Hmm, Macports.  It's great for those who want a familiar packagae-manager
> setup or just don't want to get their fingers dirty compiling source.

I'm quite comfortable compiling from source. The value I find in a
package manager is 1) keeping up with software upgrades and 2) making
it easier for people who use my own software to get up and running,
many of whom think it is unreasonable to download and install 10
prerequisites to do so.

> It
> adds itself to your PATH and can cause trouble for non-Macports builds
> (getting wrong versions of tools in the system, like GNU vs. BSD versions,
> wrong libs linked).  I don't mean to start a debate over it, just pointing
> out that you might want to look at trying to do things the Mac way first,
> like installers where available.
>
> Python does have up-to-date installers for a more Mac-standard Python
> framework install.

I appreciate the comment, and decided to not use a package manager for
the time being and try to get comfortable with the "Mac way".

Following up on my original post, I installed python-2.6.3 using the
installer at python.org, which installed into /Library/Frameworks/ and
automatically prepended
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/bin to my path in
~/.profile. With this configuration, when I install PyQt4, pyuic4 etc
end up on the path. There was no need for passing additional arguments
to configure.py.

I found some other issues related to using the system python
(/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages appearing late in PYTHONPATH, so
system-provided packages like numpy-1.2.1 are favored over manually
installed packages like numpy-1.3), so it looks like it is a good idea
to not use the system python.

Darren