Well, it took some struggle, but I got the Python project up and running on the Mac. Many of my struggles had to do with working in an unfamilar environment, although now I’m catching myself typing ls in DOS command shells :). A few of my struggles were just the rtfm kind, where I couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t work after I did step one and three… until the obvious answer, step two, hit me on the eighth or tenth read. doh.
One of the key ideas was to understand that you might install a couple of different “pythons” in a couple of different directory structures, but you only needed to specify the path to the one you wanted to work with, and they could each be used autonomously. Easy to say now, hard to grok when I was in the trenches. So, fink’s python is installed in /sw and works fine with other fink projects, MacPython is installed in /usr/bin and appears in the Application folder. Launch the first with “python” and the latter with “pythonw” or specify paths for it to be explicit.