Re: [Visualpython-users] Release: VPython 2.9.7

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

On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 16:08, Joe Heafner wrote:
> I am very pleased to report that I was able to build Visual and VPython 
> from the latest source on Mac OS 10.3.4 with no major problems. 

Excellent!

> I used 
> the mkdist_osx.sh script for the entire process. I now have an extra 
> copy of gcc on my system, but it doesn't seem to interfere with 
> anything as far as I can tell. 

I used several options to GCC's configure program to ensure that the one
being built would not interfere with the stock compiler.
- It is installed into /usr/local.
- All of the generated programs have the full GCC version number
appended to their name (eg, gcc-3.3.4 rather than gcc).
- The compiler's libraries are installed into version-specific
directories, so the system compiler will not pick up the new GCC's libs
by accident.

> The build process seemed to bring my 
> entire system to a grinding halt (quite literally) during compilation 
> of the vector array stuff. I've no idea why. 

How much memory do you have?  The system might have started swapping out
to disk.  Actually, now that I think about it, I probably should remove
'-j2' from the make commands in that script.  That option causes make to
run two jobs at once, and a few of the source files require ~200 MB of
RAM to compile - my development machine is a dualie.

Is there a way to determine how many processors are installed on a
PowerMac from the command line?

> I shut down and restarted 
> and reran the script and all worked just fine. It appears that my 
> previous VPython installation was completely overwritten, which is what 
> I would have expected.
> 
> The help facility doesn't work within IDLE, but I think I have an old 
> email somewhere explaining how to fix that. I note that VPython windows 
> seem "snappier" and more responsive than in the version I was using. 
> The new crystal.py demo is simply amazing. I've not yet tried a program 
> with a graph to see if those issues have been cleared up, but I'll try 
> tonight or tomorrow.

The only visible issue with graphs may be a bit of a stutter on startup.

Thanks for the feedback,
-Jonathan