[Author Prev][Author Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Author Index][Thread Index]

Re: [pygame] Pygame and Enthought



On Jan 7, 2010, at 10:13 AM, David Arnold wrote:
Hi,

I've installed the latest EPD 6.0 on a Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard from www.enthought.com. I'd like to give pygame a try, but I am unsure as to how it should be installed on my environment.

On www.pygame.org, I did see some installation instructions for Snow Leopard, but these depended on Macpython, a different distribution.

Has anyone installed pygame in the Enthought distribution that could lend some advice?

I can't, since I need a login. Since one is supposed to pay for this service, I suspect you can contact their customer support and find out how to use PyGame with their distro.

1) Contact Enthought. If they're going to be creating a huge pile of Python, PyGame should be one of the things they install. 

Is PyGame already part of EPD? If not, what the heck is wrong with them? 

PyGame is an awesome SDK -- takes like 30 lines of code to make a simple game!




2) PyGame installs into /Library/Frameworks/Python... which is where MacPython installs stuff. MacPython installs there, as opposed to Mac OS X's "system" copy of Python, because
a) It doesn't take THAT much disk space, and
b) It (sort of) prevents (some) badness from screwing up Mac OS X's system software.

Does EPD install into /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework? I bet it does.

I can't get to their distro, so I can't tell, but you can tell easily by using a shareware called Pacifist. You literally drop the EPD installer on the Pacifist icon, and it will show you where everything is installing. (If you'd rather do the same thing without downloading stuff, type man lsbom into a terminal window. (lsbom -f /path/to/Foo.pkg/Contents/Archive.bom is usually what you want.)

Also, and this is top secret, so don't tell anyone, most installer packages are "bundles" which means they're really folders in disguise. You can CMD-CLICK on a bundle and use the contextual menu to "Show Contents" -- and then double-click the Archive.pax.gz file to expand everything and look at what gets installed where.

Mac installer packages that are not bundles are called "flat file installers" and pkgutil --expand can open them up. 


3) Worst case, you can install MacPython and Pygame and various other python libraries yet again, and have THREE copies on your Mac -- but it's only wasting MAYBE 200 MB at the most. (OK, so that's not so great, but hey, at least you can use PyGame.)