Ronald Oussoren <ronaldousso...@mac.com> added the comment: Let me first explain in more detail why pythonw is needed in the first place: MacOSX only allows access to a large number of GUI-related APIs from application bundles (the symbols are of course always available, but the APIs fail when you are calling them from an executable that is not in an application bundle)
This is why we introduced pythonw in framework builds of Python. Pythonw is a small executable that does nothing else but execv the real python interpreter that is in and .app bundle inside the Python framework (Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Pytho n). The full path to the execv-ed interpreter is hardcoded into the pythonw executable. To be able to switch between 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Python a 4- way universal build of Python creates 3 variations of the Python executable inside the .app bundle: Python-32, Python-64 and Python (the latter being 4-way universal). There are also 3 variations of the pythonw executable (such as pythonw-32) that execv the proper version of the interpreter. Using posix_spawn and the other API's I mention it should be fairly easy to create a simpler situation where we need only one copy of Python in the .app bundle, with the pythonw wrapper selecting the required architecture(s) before executing the real interpreter. Making pythonw fully reusable by virtualenv requires some more work, and requires more support code in virtualenv itself as well. One fairly easy way to accomplish easy reusability without requiring a C compiler is to use a large buffer for storing the path to the real interpreter, virtualenv could then patch the executable. Another option is to link the pythonw executable to Python.framework and then use dyld APIs to find the path to the Python framework and from that the executable. As an aside, virtualenv copies the shared library in Python.framework into virtual environments, this is needed because the framework build uses the location of that shared library to determine sys.prefix. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue6834> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
