Hi there, I’m having issue with the python3 installation provided by Xcode’s toolchain. I’m currently writing a LLDB plugin, using the LLDB python API, to allow the user to visualize audio data from the current debugged program in a GUI, using tkinter and matplotlib. I'm using those because I'm developing a cross-platform plugin, as I'm initially a Linux developer who wants to make this available to my fellow Apple audio devs.
My issue arise at least on two setups
- MacOS 12.7.6 Monterey with Xcode 14.2
- MacOS 14 with Xcode 15.4 (not my machine)
Because I wanna support Xcode’s toolchain, I want to use Xcode’s lldb. Xcode’s lldb uses Xcode’s provided python, which I’m having issues with when loading tkinter.The issue can be reproduced like this :
> xcrun python3 -c "import tkinter;tkinter._test()"
macOS 12 (1207) or later required, have instead 12 (1206) !
zsh: abort xcrun python3 -c "import tkinter;tkinter._test()"
On MacOS 14 the version numbers are :
macOS 14 (1407) or later required, have instead 14 (1406) !
You can see it fails to load tkinter. From what I understood so far, it looks like the tkinter/tcl/tk version distributed with Xcode is not supported by MacOS ?I checked and the imported tkinter module is definitely the one provided by Xcode’s toolchain :
# Checking where tkinter is installed
> fd "^tkinter$" /Applications/Xcode.app
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Library/Frameworks/Python3.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/tkinter/
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Library/Frameworks/Python3.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/tkinter/
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Library/Frameworks/Python3.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/site-packages/future/moves/tkinter/
# Checking that Xcode python uses the right module - it matches
> xcrun python3 -c "import tkinter;print(tkinter.sys.modules['tkinter'])"
<module 'tkinter' from '/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Library/Frameworks/Python3.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/tkinter/__init__.py'>
I can get a working tkinter working by installing it using homebrew or macports, but I’m not able to use it with Xcode’s python installation. I tried overwriting sys.path to force Xcode’s python to import homebrew’s tkinter module, but it still loads Xcode’s tkinter .so.
In the crash report I can see it indeed loads tcl/tk 8.5 and loads _tkinter.cpython-39-darwin.so from Xcode. I could disable the SIP (System Integrity Protection) to force to load another version of the library, but that wouldn’t be something I can ask the users.
On the LLDB forum, they advise against using another python interpreter that the one provided by the toolchain. So is there a way to get the provided tkinter/tcl/tk installation to work ? If not I’m confused about why it’s provided in the first place.
Thanks a lot for your time and please tell me if you have any questions.
PS: if possible i'll post the head of the crash report in the comment of this post