[PyQt] question about installation best practices on OS X

[Darren Dale]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Darren Dale <dsdale24 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I don't want to turn this into a forum to air general mac issues, but
I have to qualify that last remark. The mac installers distributed by
python.org do not appear to support a 64 bit environment. So I am back
to using the system python.

Darren