In article <4d261d2e.5070...@verizon.net>, Gerry Reno <gr...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 01/06/2011 02:44 PM, Bill Felton wrote: [...] > > I've also seen various resources indicate that one can install both Python > > 2.7 and Python 3.1 -- but when I did this, I get no end of problems in the > > 2.7 install. IDLE, in particular, fails rather spectacularly, even if I > > launch it directly from the Python 2.7 directory in which it resides. > > So, either I've been misled and should only try to have one or the other. > > OR I'm missing some (probably simple) step that's mucking me up. > > Help? > You probably want to use 'virtualenv' for keeping things separated.
There are certainly good reasons to use virtualenv but simply to distinguish between Py2 and Py3 is not one of them. There is no ambiguity, using a "standard" distribution on OS X or any other platform that I'm aware of, between Python 2 and Python 3 installations. (Or, at least, any ambiguity that virtualenv would help resolve.) While you could get into an ambiguous situation if you install things yourself and are not careful about which targets are installed (and some additional versioning endcases are being addressed in the upcoming Python 3.2 release), all python3-related scripts and libraries are generally installed with different names (i.e. by adding a "3" somewhere) than their Python 2 counterparts. -- Ned Deily, n...@acm.org -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
