[Bitpim-devel] Startup script for BitPim on Macs

[Tom P. <mlp...@ea...>]

On Mar 15, 2004, at 12:00 AM, Roger Binns wrote:
> On Mar 15, Tom Pollard wrote:
>> Personally, I think that the startup script for BitPim should be a
>> shell script, rather than a Python script.
>
> You should discuss this on bitpim-devel.  On the other platforms, and
> I had believed Mac as well, the binary distribution of BitPim includes
> the Python interpretter and all modules needed (both ones written in
> Python and the necessary shared libraries).

I'm not sure how things are done on the other platforms, but I would 
have expected you to use the 'freeze' system for packaging a  script as 
a standalone executable, similarly to 'perl2exe' and it's ilk.  These 
systems package up the scripts, modules and dlls needed to run a script 
in a zip archive with a binary loader prepended.  The loader is 
responsible for unpacking things, setting up the environment and 
executing your script using the bundled interpreter.  This lets you run 
your script even if perl or python isn't installed at all on the target 
machine.

The way BitPim's packaged for the Mac is simpler; MacOS X makes it easy 
to do something along the lines of perl2exe without actually using a 
single zip archive with a binary loader.  But, you still need something 
like a loader to kick things off.  For BitPim, that's a small Python 
script.  This seems a little inelegant; since, this first script is the 
guy who sets things up so that subsequent python scripts can use the 
bundled python interpreter and modules, and so it requires the user to 
have a separate, working Python installation.  From the recent problem 
report on the bitpim-user list, we saw that Python is an optional 
install on MacOS X.  The BitPim startup script doesn't do anything that 
you can't do just as easily with a shell script, and a shell script 
would remove the need for a working Python on the user's machine.

Anyway, this is just a suggestion.  Most Mac BitPim users do seem to 
have Python installed.  In any case, I've attached a shell script that 
could be used to replace the current BitPim python startup script.  It 
uses a small shell function to extract the parent directory name from a 
filepath because the 'dirname' shell utility (like Python) is only 
there in MacOS X if the user installs the optional BSD package. 
Otherwise, it's just about line-for-line equivalent with the python 
version.

Cheers,

Tom