Which Mac daily build to use
Hi Matt, The Mac Chimera builds are far too numerous now. I recommend the 64-bit Cocoa build. That is what I use. It has one very serious issue right now that pressing Option-e or Option plus many other other characters will immediately crash Chimera. It is a Tk Cocoa bug that I reported but I need to put a fix into Chimera while I wait for the Tk developers to fix it. If that sounds too dangerous use the Chimera Aqua build (32-bit only). That uses the Mac Carbon API which is the older Mac API that Apple says they will not provide 64-bit support for. So we will replace that with Cocoa in the Chimera 1.5 release in a few months. My least favorite choice is Mac X11 which is not the native Mac windowing system and is the least well supported. That Chimera version will also be eliminated in the future. For the 32-bit versus 64-bit Chimera Cocoa you should use 64-bit if you have Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or 32-bit for older Mac OS versions. We don't offer 64-bit Mac Chimera on Mac OS 10.5 or older Mac OS versions. Mac OS 10.6 is the first version of Mac OS that uses 64-bit by default. I've measured performance of 64-bit Mac Cocoa Chimera and it is as good as 32-bit. For the Chimera 1.5 release we hope to only be offering two production Mac Chimera versions 32-bit and 64-bit Cocoa. The X11 version will be in the unsupported category and the Aqua (= Carbon) will be gone. Tom
On 2/19/10 9:03 PM, Thomas Goddard wrote:
Any reason the 64-bit Cocoa version isn't supported on 10.5? Tk-Cocoa works fine on 10.5. -- Kevin Walzer Code by Kevin http://www.codebykevin.com
Hi Kevin, Although we should be able to make 64-bit Mac Chimera run on Mac OS 10.5 we do not have the time to do this given our many other priorities. The trouble is that Chimera depends on about 40 third-party libraries that we automatically build along with Chimera. Making the build scripts for those libraries compile 64-bit instead of the default 32-bit on Mac OS 10.5 is expected to be a significant bit of work. On Mac OS 10.6 the compilers use 64-bit by default so the third-party libraries don't need any special configuration to get 64-bit binaries. One of the competing priorities is working around 20 bugs found so far in Tk Cocoa that effect Chimera http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/ticket/7931 I have reported many of these Tk Cocoa bugs but it does not look like the Tk Cocoa developer Daniel Steffens will not have time to work on these in the short term, so I have to find ways to patch the problems within Chimera. Tom
On Feb 19, 2010, at 8:03 PM, Thomas Goddard wrote:
The Mac Chimera builds are far too numerous now. I recommend the 64-bit Cocoa build. That is what I use. It has one very serious issue right now that pressing Option-e or Option plus many other other characters will immediately crash Chimera. It is a Tk Cocoa bug that I reported but I need to put a fix into Chimera while I wait for the Tk developers to fix it.
The 64-bit cocoa build also seems to die whenever you close an IDLE window. -- Mark
Hi Mark, Yeah, in fact, in all daily builds (Mac, Windows, Linux) Chimera closes when you close the IDLE (Python shell) window. This is a problem introduced by updating from Python 2.5 to 2.6, not a Mac Cocoa problem. It is default IDLE behavior to raise SystemExit when it closes and Chimera has to do something special to avoid that bad behavior. The special Chimera fix for that used by older Chimera versions no longer works. http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/ticket/8153 Tom
The 64-bit cocoa build also seems to die whenever you close an IDLE window.
participants (4)
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Kevin Walzer -
Mark Moll -
Thomas Goddard -
Tom Goddard