If you build Python with --disable-toolbox-glue on OS X, the attempt to 
import ctypes fails because it critically depends on "gestalt", one of 
the modules in the toolbox.  It only uses this to check whether the OS 
level is 10.4 or something earlier, and only once, at load.  Might be a 
good idea to substitute a check which doesn't require the toolbox, such 
as looking at platform.release().

Would you like to prepare a patch?  I have no idea how the return values
of gestalt.gestalt("sysv") and platform.release() relate to each other...

Here's a patch against the trunk.  I've only tried it on OS X 10.4.10, and 
only with test_ctypes.  Ideally, we should test on an earlier version of 
OS X, but I don't have one handy.

On the mac where I have access to platform.release() returns the string
'8.10.0'.  gestalt.gestalt("sysv") returns 0x1049.  Your patch does not
look correct to me.

Sorry, you're absolutely right.  Here's a corrected patch.

This patch looks better.  However, the 'os.uname()' function seems to
return the information that we need; so I updated the patch to use this
instead.  Can you please proofread it (osx.patch) ?

Yes, that works too.  It seems to be another way of accessing
the same information; it's not clear to me which is preferable.

Bill

On 9/25/07, Thomas Heller <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
>
> Thomas Heller added the comment:
>
> This patch looks better.  However, the 'os.uname()' function seems to
> return the information that we need; so I updated the patch to use this
> instead.  Can you please proofread it (osx.patch) ?
>
> __________________________________
> Tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> <http://bugs.python.org/issue1203>
> __________________________________
>

IMO os.uname() is preferable.
Committed as SVN rev 58415 in trunk.
Thanks.