pythonmac.org packages and missing extensions

The Python 2.3.0 distributed with Mac OS X 10.3 is missing three extensions typically found on other platforms:

_bsddb
_tkinter
readline

Since these are part of the standard library, it is somewhat annoying to build them after the fact. I have put together a little svn repository with the relevant setup scripts and sources:

http://svn.red-bean.com/bob/MacPythonPantherExtras/trunk/

Installer packages for these three extensions are available at:

http://pythonmac.org/packages/

Note that _bsddb and readline include their respective dependencies statically, where _tkinter requires TclTkAqua 8.4.

Many other packages are also available from this repository, including PantherPythonFix, wxPython, Numeric and numarray (with AltiVec support via Apple's Accelerate framework), PIL (with tiff, jpeg, and Tkinter support), and matplotlib (with Agg, wxPython, and Tkinter support contributed by Chris Barker).

The majority of these packages are only available for the Python 2.3.0 that ships with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), but a few are available for Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar). These Jaguar packages are compatible with the MacPython 2.3 distribution (even if used on Mac OS X 10.3 or later).

Most of the packages in this repository were built with the bdist_mpkg command of py2app. Building your own redistributable package installers can be as easy as:

bdist_mpkg setup.py --zipdist

The --zipdist option is currently only available in py2app svn trunk, but will be part of the 0.1.8 release later this month.