[lxml-dev] Binary egg for Mac OS X

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

Stefan Eletzhofer wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Stefan Behnel wrote:
>> What I would like to see is a really fat egg, i.e. one that works on all
>> hardware platforms supported by MacOS-X. I have no idea how to do that,
>> so I can't provide any hints. But since there seem to be some MacOS users
>> on the list by now, I hope we can get away with some web digging plus
>> trial and error.
>
> Well, I don't know if that's possible -- AFAIK there's only "binary
> eggs" and that's it.

That would be a compiler option, if I'm not mistaken.


>> Also, the build must not rely on any macports libraries, as not everyone
>> uses macports. So we'd have to make sure it's only built against system
>> libraries (plus the statically built libxml2/libxslt).
>
> objdump says that this is true for libs built by the staticlxml recipe.

Ok, although I'd prefer getting the eggs created using lxml's own static
build.


>> What about the "system Python vs. macports Python" question? Would such
>> an
>> egg work on both? Or does it make more sense to support only the system
>> Python installation, and to leave macports specific builds to the
>> macports maintainers?
>
> Well, we'd probly need to support all the python **versions** (2.4,
> 2.5, ...).  And
> being statically built, it does per definition not interfer with other
> libs, so we should be pretty safe here.

IMO, it should only be statically built against libxml2 and libxslt, the
rest would be taken from the system libs. Static building is evil, unless
it *really* solves a problem.


> So all in all, I think we should identify:
>
> - the LXML versions which are "important enough" to support (1.2.6
> anyone?)

Since everything before 2.2 is out of maintenance (and the API is mostly
compatible across versions anyway), I'd prefer having eggs for 2.2+ only.
Providing older eggs will just let people run into ancient bugs.


> - the python versions which we support (surely 2.4 and 2.5. what other
> versions?)

We currently have Windows eggs for 2.4/5/6 and 3.0, so having the same
span for MacOS eggs would be nice.


> I could perhaps set up a semi-automated system on my mac server to build
> these.
> I can also put them on a FTP / Web Server somewhere, and I could (given
> access) also upload the static eggs to PyPi.

Sure. Do you have a PyPI account?


> Do we want to give the static versions a dedicated name?
> "lxml-x.y.z-static" or smth like
> that?  Maybe not everyone wants static eggs (even not on OSX boxen)?

I would want them to be the default download on MacOS (i.e. no special
naming), but only after some testing by some MacOS users on differently
configured systems, i.e. using different MacOS versions, different package
distributions, different Python versions, etc. So maybe you could provide
them separately first?

Thanks for volunteering!

Stefan