Re: [Visualpython-users] Mac installer

[Bruce S. <Bru...@nc...>]

We all thank Martin Costabel for his most appreciated work in providing 
a VPython installer for the Mac, which greatly simplifies the 
installation procedure.

Martin, thanks for pointing out a mistake in the vpython.org 
installation instructions, now corrected. Indeed, we now depend on the 
IDLE that comes with Python, and it is not appropriate to install the 
old IDLE for VPython.

You apparently have packaged the VPython version of the IDLE 
configuration file Libs/idlelib/config-main.def, since IDLE lists 
"Visual" on its help menu. The file contains this entry:

[HelpFiles]
1 = Visual;C:\Python23\Lib\site-packages\visual\docs\index.html

You could rebuild your visual-py23 installer to point to the /sw/share 
location of the Visual documentation in this configuration file.

That doesn't of course address the Python installation problem that 
results in IDLE not pointing to Python documentation. When I looked 
around in the Python installation, the only documentation files I found 
seemed to be in LaTeX, so it seemed that there wasn't any html for IDLE 
to point to. There does seem to be an inconsistency in the Python 
installer. Since IDLE is a part of the Python installation, it's a bug 
that the IDLE link to Python documentation seems to be broken.

Bruce Sherwood

Martin Costabel wrote:

> Jonathan Brandmeyer wrote:
> []
> 
>>> You install fink, then ask to binary install visual-py23, and it 
>>> installs all the other needed packages, including Python. The only 
>>> slight glitch is that the Visual documentation isn't placed with the 
>>> other Visual stuff in site-packages/visual but rather in 
>>> sw/share/doc/visual-py23,
>>
>>
>>
>> This conforms with policies that are applied Fink-wide.  IMO it is
>> entirely appropriate.
> 
> 
> I could, of course, make a symlink in the python site-packages 
> directory, or vice-versa, but there are more serious problems with IDLE 
> and documentation, see below.
> 
>>> which IDLE doesn't point to. 
>>
>>
>>
>> Perhaps Mr. Costabel would be willing to add it in the fink package's
>> post-install script? (see /sw/lib/python2.3/idlelib/config-main.def)
> 
> 
> I have started to look at this, and I have a question: Right now, the 
> idle_VPython module is not being installed (contrary to what the new web 
> page seems to indicate). This is the default for python-2.3 as it seems, 
> because there is already an IDLE module. Would it be useful to install 
> this module or is it not advisable with python-2.3? Is it too broken?
> 
> I don't know much about IDLE, and there is still a bug in Fink's python 
> package that prevents IDLE to read html documentation (it thinks 
> dar'win' is a kind of windows OS). This is not hard to fix, but I am not 
> the maintainer of the python package. The advantage of installing 
> idle_VPython would be that I could easily configure this so that it 
> finds the documentation and maybe fix the bug if it is there, too, or 
> other bugs.
> 
> I have also been looking at vpython-3.0 on and off, too. It is not too 
> hard to translate the mkdist_osx.sh script into a Fink package 
> description. What keeps me from releasing a Fink package is that it 
> needs a complete gcc and boost, and I am not yet clear in my mind how 
> this should be related to other Fink packages. Is it acceptable that 
> building vpython would use 600 MB of disk space and take 5 hours? I was 
>  thinking of splitting it and have a separate gcc package, but this 
> needs some more thinking.
>