Windows and Mac support

[geofft]

There are already Windows and Mac builds on python.org. It seems to me it would be nice to either reuse them or fold them into this project, otherwise we will get even more questions of the form "what's the difference between ___ and ___ and how should I pick one?". It also seems like it would make things more difficult from a support perspective if a user is running "the official python.org builds" and there are two slightly different options for those.

I asked about macOS builds in #3 (comment) and @emmatyping says, "the current macOS builds are installers rather than portable builds." I'm a little surprised by this, I thought they were framework builds and framework builds are inherently relocatable?

If they are not, does it make sense to make the existing Mac and Windows builds relocatable (i.e., their installers install relocatable archives that you can download directly) instead of doing a separate set of relocatable builds for those platforms?

[brettcannon]

Windows is fine (@zooba is already participating and has said it isn't a concern). For macOS, that's a call for @ned-deily .

"the current macOS builds are installers rather than portable builds."

What @emmatyping meant by that is it's a GUI installer, so there isn't a "folding them in" as much as whether Ned feels it makes sense for the macOS GUI installer to use whatever build this project produces versus something else.

[freakboy3742]

FWIW: the current macOS Framework isn't relocatable (see python/cpython#86680); it's hard coded to be installed in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework, with all linking references being absolute references. It's not a big deal to modify the existing framework to make it relocatable - but that's not what the current macOS framework build emits; and there's plenty of code in the macOS Python ecosystem that expects that /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/... is the location to find an installer.

[emmatyping]

Sorry I was unclear @geofft! Yeah I was mostly thinking the current framework installers are designed to be installed with a GUI and thus feel rather different than what I view a portable build as being (i.e. I can curl the build somewhere and start running things). That might be more extreme than what others have in mind, but as @zooba said, that's the model of pymanager, and I think it makes life a lot easier for redistribution.

It'd probably be good to resolve python/cpython#86680 as part of these efforts, but I don't use macOS much at all personally so I defer to those much wiser than me on the topic :)

[zooba]

their installers install relocatable archives that you can download directly

This is precisely what the Python install manager for Windows does already, and it seems likely that we'd extend that model (the CLI structure, at least) to other platforms to make these available, at least if we want these packages to be our users' default choice.

For Windows, they are the default choice, so we need tooling to make them easily accessible, but it may be that they remain "special" for macOS/Linux and we can expect users to manage archive files by hand (as we did for years with the Windows embeddable distro).

But yeah, I've been quietly making the Windows build fully relocatable since I started working on it, and it's been perfectly viable since 3.7.

[brettcannon]

it seems likely that we'd extend that model (the CLI structure, at least) to other platforms to make these available, at least if we want these packages to be our users' default choice.

That's my plan after we have the binaries to install. 😊 Python Launchers for everybody!