I know how Tim Bray feels when he writes about his difficulties installing some fairly standard open source software on his Mac. While Tim's battles have been with perl and mysql, I've been fighting with python. More accurately, I've had trouble installing a variety of third-party python modules on Mac OS X.
So I gave up.
I decided to use my Windows box as a python development environment. I actually already had a couple of flavors of python installed (2.1 and 2.2...yes, I know I'm at least .1 out of date). 4Suite installed without a hitch (I never could get it compile on my Mac). So, I finally had an XSLT processor to use with python.
Next, I went off in search of an editor. On the Mac, I've been very happy with BBEdit. I decided to check out some python-specific editors. Boa Constructor, and open-source product, looked cool. The install went fine, but it was very buggy during use. Every time I tried to save it would throw an error. And it was slow. Not fun. Next, I tried a trial version of ActiveState's Komodo. It turned out to be a very nice little IDE for a number of languages. I'm considering buying a copy when my trial runs out. Before I do that, I'd like to try out the Wing IDE.
So, things have installed nicely, and I have a decent programming environment. But, all was not rosy. I blew a fair amount of time trying to figure out why what looked like perfectly good code kept throwing syntax errors. Turned out it was a problem with some code I'd copied and pasted from my Mac. The Windows version of python didn't like the end-of-line characters. Once I figured it out and fixed, the code worked fine.
Posted by Karl
October 26, 2003 08:25 PM