[Visualpython-users] native Mac

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

We have a Mac lab and one of the support people made the following 
comment, which I pass along on the chance it will suggest another 
possible approach for someone in the VPython community who is 
knowledgeable about the Mac environment.

----------------------
I find it much more difficult for me to support the separate Xwindows 
vpython.  My goal is to get to a native MacOS X implementation which can 
be layered on the python that ships from the vendor.  From my stand 
point if I could just add Numeric and Visual to 
/Library/Python/2.3/site-packages and then call 
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/idlelib/idle 
  I am way ahead of the game support wise (no Xwindows to block logout, 
no long build sessions, vendor does most of the work, etc).

So to that end, the dependencies not shipped with 10.4 appear to be 
Boost and Gtk+ (which both have 10.3/4 native builds). I believe that a 
full non-Xwindows build of Visual could be done (Numeric and numarray 
are already available at http://pythonmac.org/packages/) but I do not 
have the resources to put into any development in this area.  There may 
be other dependencies I am not aware of as well.

Otherwise:
For the individual user the workaround posted by Aaron Titus is fine. 
If you wanted to extend that by creating a platypus 
(http://sveinbjorn.sytes.net/platypus) application which would be a self 
contained application of the vpython Xwindows parts from fink that would 
be great!!