golly-test Mailing List for Golly

Dear Golly Gang members and Golly-Testers,

Hope you all are doing well.

Supporting Python in Windows is full of quirks and un-reproducibilities ;)
After inspecting I see that loading Python is more nuianced than I have
thought.
(It is solvable with some caveats; I'll leave the details as a postscript.)

On the conwaylife discord, there are some ideas for an alternative
mechanism for loading Python (mostly by WildMyron):

A. Try to load the most frequent paths of Python, by default.
B. (Not exclusive to A) Use a FileDialog to let the user choose the DLL
explicitly.
C. (Exclusive to A and B) Embed a Python Interpreter in Golly and don't ask
for any paths.

What do  you think about these alternatives?

Best wishes to you, Scorbie (Dongook Lee)

=== PostScript - Windows Python quirks ===

1. Python's Home Path
- Python loads it's home path from Registry keys (and Environment variables)
- Standard Python distributions set the registry keys, so it has been
working without further work from Golly.
- But, Golly will crash loading other Python distributions that don't set
the registry keys, notably Anaconda.
- Therefore we need to retrieve an absolute path of Python's home directory.
- This can be done, but then, if (Python 3.x in PATH &&
python3_dir==python3x.dll)
  then Python won't load automatically, and the user has to locate Python
the first time loading Python.

2. `python3.dll` vs `python3x.dll`
- I think it is wise to not support for `python3.dll` (as python3x.dll
should work)
- Reason: wxWidgets cannot load `python3.dll` in some distributions.
  - wxWidgets can load `python3.dll`iff the symbols are represented as
absolute hex addresses, not sourcing from `python3x.dll`

=== End of PostScript - Windows Python quirks ===

In theory, python3.dll should also work. (thus user gameoflifemaniac's post
is a bug)
Also there were reports of crashes using python39.dll, most not
reproducible :(

I'll email you personally in case this gets off-topic from this mailing
list.

Best wishes to you, Scorbie (Dongook Lee)





On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 4:42 PM Andrew Trevorrow <and...@gm...>
wrote:

> Scorbie:
>
> I'm aware of the Windows part of the issue reports in the conwaylife
>> forums:
>> https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4827&p=109332
>> (Sorry for the python3.dll confusion, that was my bad in the past)
>> Am working on it, I hope to finish it in a few hours but may take longer.
>>
>>> <" rel="nofollow">https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/golly-test>
>>
>>
> I thought the Windows issue had been resolved, so what exactly are you
> working on?
> (The only issue I'm aware of is that some Mac users can't use Python 3.9
> for some
> reason that currently has me baffled.)
>
> Andrew
>
>

Scorbie:

I'm aware of the Windows part of the issue reports in the conwaylife forums:
> https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4827&p=109332
> (Sorry for the python3.dll confusion, that was my bad in the past)
> Am working on it, I hope to finish it in a few hours but may take longer.
>
>> <" rel="nofollow">https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/golly-test>
>
>
I thought the Windows issue had been resolved, so what exactly are you
working on?
(The only issue I'm aware of is that some Mac users can't use Python 3.9
for some
reason that currently has me baffled.)

Andrew

I'm aware of the Windows part of the issue reports in the conwaylife forums:
https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4827&p=109332
(Sorry for the python3.dll confusion, that was my bad in the past)
Am working on it, I hope to finish it in a few hours but may take longer.

Best wishes to you, Scorbie (Dongook Lee)





On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 9:00 PM Andrew Trevorrow <and...@gm...>
wrote:

> Golly 4.0 is now available from sourceforge:
>
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/golly/files/golly/golly-4.0/
>
> Andrew
>
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