Differences between Framework and non-Framework builds of Python on Mac OS X

Question

Question

What are the differences between a Framework build and a non-Framework build (i.e., standard UNIX build) of Python on Mac OS X? Also, what are the advanta

Answer 1

Framework builds are owned by the 'root' account when installed. A source build will be owned by the account installing it. The advantage (and disadvantage) of having ownership of the Python installation is that you don't need to change accounts to modify it.

A small difference is that Framework builds are built against the EditLine library. Source builds are usually compiled against the Readline library. Depending upon which library Python is compiled against, the readline module in the standard library works slightly differently. See 'man python' on Mac OS X for more details on this.

There is a nice buildout for automating the compile of Python 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6 from source on Mac OS X, which is explained here. This will compile against a custom build of readline. However, the usefulness of scripting the source install is that you can make additional tweaks to your custom Python builds, e.g. installing essential distributions such as virtualenv, or harder to install distributions such as PIL.