[Visualpython-users] Success on OSX

[Jonathan B. <jbr...@ea...>]

I am pleased to announce that VPython will build cleanly on OS X out of
the box.  The 2.0.3 release should be appearing on our download page
soon, which implements the required features.

You should use the latest patch release of OSX due to conflics with
OpenGL in some earlier versions.  We used 10.2.6 on our test machine.
Use the December 2002 developers tools to build visual.
Use the fink-suppled Python 2.2.x  We have not tested visual with a
framework based python installation, as found in MacPython.  Some clever
manipulation of environment variables might make this possible in the
current state, but we haven't tried yet.
Use the latest X11 environment from Apple, *and* the X11 SDK.

./configure --prefix=/sw
make
make install

should be all you need to do to build and install VPython on OSX.  Make
sure that python is started from within X11.  If you get an error like,
"cannot open display", followed by a crash, than you started the
interpreter from outside the X11 environment.

The installation script also produces a shell script that automatically
starts Idle for VPython using the interpreter that visual was configured
and installed under.  The script is installed into $(prefix)/bin.  Fine
control may be achieved with --bindir=/foo/bar.  Simply run "vpython"
and everything should "just work".  All platforms recieve this feature.

The source package also builds on Windows with the MinGW port of GCC. 
This is mainly to help test on Windows with a Free compiler.  The
Windows binary distribution that we provide will continue to be built
with MSVC 6.

As a final enhancement, many superfluous warnings have been silenced,
making for a much quiter build.

Enjoy,
Jonathan Brandmeyer