python3 alias or executable

[Nils Breunese]

Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> I have several python versions installed an dused as dependencies my macports itself. Fine.
> To build ArcticFox browser, I need python2 and on 10.9 this is no issue, I guess the system python is getting used.
> Now I want to try do build current SeaMonkey since no binary is provided anymore. Officially it fails, but I wanted to sniff around and maybe with some experts here we can update things.
> 
> However:
> Lirr:seamonkey-2.53.18.2 multix$ ./mach build
> This mach command requires python3, which wasn't found on the system!
> 
> I suppose this is business for python_select port, right?

python_select lets you select the default Python installation to use in your terminal, but generally shouldn’t be necessary to build software that uses Python. I am not familiar with building SeaMonkey, but according to https://www.seamonkey-project.org/dev/code-development#prerequisites both Python 2.7.18 and Python 3.6.6 are required. If you have those installed, but the SeaMonkey build script can’t locate python3, then maybe their build tooling allows explicitly specifying the path to your Python 3 installation?

If you currently don’t have python3 on your path, then using python_select to set that up, may help to let the SeaMonkey build find it, but if you plan on creating a Portfile for SeaMonkey, you probably shouldn’t rely on something like that and explicitly point the build script to MacPorts’ Python 3 installation instead.

SeaMonkey also seems to provide binary releases for macOS x64: https://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/

Nils