Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Pure Python Cocoa GUI application?

[Ronald O. <ron...@ma...>]

On 31 Mar, 2009, at 18:02, Greg Ewing wrote:

> Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>
>> Both should work the same on recent versions of Python (at worst
>> starting at 2.6, I haven't check 2.5 but IIRC even there python and
>> pythonw are the same executable).
>
> On further investigation, it seems you're right. I was sure
> I had a situation just recently where python wouldn't give
> me a dock icon, but I can't seem to reproduce it now.
>
> The part about it being inside an app bundle doesn't seem
> to be right, though, at least for 2.5:

We're way more sneaky than that ;-).  If you look carefully you'll  
notice that the pythonw executable is tiny and doesn't actually link  
with the Python framework. That's because this executable has just one  
task: exec-ing the executable inside the Python.app application.

This is needed to ensure that the C-level argv[0] contains a path that  
is an absolute path that contains proof that we're inside a .app  
bundle. We cannot tweak argv[0] inside a running application, Apple's  
framework fetch the value of argv[0] from some other, hidden and  
undocumented, location.

That's why the executable inside virtualenv environments behaves  
differently, that executable is the one that is normally inside the  
"Python.app" bundle.

Ronald