[lxml-dev] Binary egg for Mac OS X

[Martin Aspeli]

Stefan Behnel wrote:
> Martin Aspeli wrote:
>> Stefan Behnel wrote:
>>> Alexander Limi wrote:
>>>> I'm working on documenting Deliverance / xdv for use with Plone. It has  
>>>> lxml as a dependency, and I have run into a serious issue:
>>>>
>>>> On Mac OS X, we can't assume that people have Xcode (ie. gcc and friends)  
>>>> installed, thus we can't really compile lxml on those computers, not even  
>>>> using the staticlxml[1] recipe.
>>>>
>>>> I see that there are binary eggs for Windows, is there a special reason  
>>>> why there are no binary eggs for OS X, or is it just a matter of not  
>>>> having the infrastructure to make it available?
>>> The main problem is that many MacOS-X users have some kind of package
>>> distribution like macports installed, which usually has some distribution
>>> specific setup/dependencies/paths/whatever. OTOH, those users won't be the
>>> target for a binary distribution of lxml anyway.
>> Well, I use MacPorts.
> 
> The problem is that macports is not the only package distribution. Trying
> to support them all from lxml's setup.py is futile. Hence the static builds
> that are independent of the installed libraries.

If a static build works for everyone, I'll be ecstatic (pun intended).

>>>> Happy to help find a solution if it's just a matter of locating a
>>>> reliable way to get it compiled every time there is a new release.
>>> Yes, I'd be happy if we could get a static binary egg for each release. I
>>> don't have a Mac myself (and I'm definitely not a Mac user), so
>>> contributions are welcome.
>>>
>>> http://codespeak.net/lxml/build.html#building-lxml-on-macos-x
>> So, if we followed those steps to build a statically compiled egg for 
>> each Python version we support (2.4 and 2.6 for Plone...), and uploaded 
>> that to PyPI, we'd be able to just depend on this version of lxml and 
>> no-one on OSX should ever get these annoying problems? That'd be really 
>> nice. ;)
>>
>> If this is the case, we'll find someone to do this. Are you able to give 
>> someone access to the PyPI page and any relevant support to make this
>> happen?
> 
> Sure. Sidnei da Silva provides the Windows builds, and I'm happy to add
> another package maintainer for MacOS.

Great! I'll try to find a volunteer.

>> Finally - what about Linux? Is it rarely/never a problem, or should we 
>> be trying to make binary eggs there too? Is it possible to make binary 
>> eggs that work across the most common distributions?
> 
> As long as you have a somewhat recent system, installing lxml is trivial
> here. Plus, updating the system installations of libxml2 and libxslt isn't
> hard either, so that's a totally different situation than for MacOS.

Right. We haven't had too many complaints yet, at least. It'd be nice to 
have some binary eggs, though, if they can be done reliably, for people 
who don't have libxml2/libxslt installed.

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book