[lxml-dev] Binary egg for Mac OS X

[Tres Seaver]

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Martin Aspeli wrote:
> 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,

The last time I had trouble with it (a CentOS 4 box), building the
static version myself was any easy workaround.

>>> 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?

No, nor would it be desirable to try.

>> 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.

- -1 to uploading any binary eggs for Linux:  they will get preferred over
the source distributions, which is not what I want at all.


Tres.
- --
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Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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