Open Bug 913117 Opened 11 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Reject or warn when running Apple's Python distribution

Categories

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

All
macOS
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

People

(Reporter: gps, Unassigned)

Details

The default Python on many OS X is old and buggy (see bug 659881 for one weird issue). We should consider having the build system very strongly warn or reject when Apple's Python distribution is used to build the tree. Said warning should encourage people to run |mach bootstrap| to install Python from Homebrew or MacPorts.
Actually the bug is Python's, not Apple's.  The bug is triggered when Apple builds Python for a given version of OS X with MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET set to that version.  See bug 659881 comment #8.

Please, please, please don't let us end up requiring some kind of Mozilla-specific build of Python.

By the way, this issue is (or was) being followed at http://bugs.python.org/issue9516.
It'd be worth investigating to find out if this bug is fixed in the latest Python 2.7.X from http://www.python.org/.  That currently seems to be Python 2.7.5.
http://bugs.python.org/issue9516 appears to be included in Python 2.7.3 (but not 2.7.2, which is what OS X 10.8 ships with).

Perhaps this is a dupe of bug 870420?
Note that the lowest version of OS X we currently support is 10.6.

So if we do our own custom build, or publish instructions for others to do one, MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET should (currently) be set to 10.6.

But it'd be easiest for us if (say) Python.org's Python 2.7.5 no longer had this bug, and we no longer had to care what MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET was set to when it was built.
> Perhaps this is a dupe of bug 870420?

Only if Python 2.7.3 really does fix this bug.  Someone needs to find out.
> Only if Python 2.7.3 really does fix this bug.

Only if Python 2.7.3/2.7.5 really does fix bug 659881.
Product: Core → Firefox Build System
Severity: normal → S3
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