How to compile PyObjC for Python 3 on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion

Another one for teh Google...

It so happens that I am curious about PyObjC, the Python bindings for Objective-C, which is the "native" language of choice for OSX/iOS.

As usual, my timing is completely wrong: recent versions of Xcode dropped support for PyObjC, and the project has shrunk to basically one person (that Ronald Oussoren I previously mentioned). The version on PyPI seems to work with Python 2.x only. Even the official page on Sourceforge is basically abandoned, and packages available from there are obsolete. This is a problem because I'm really trying hard to do everything with Python 3 these days, and the PyObjC version shipped with OSX 10.8 "Mountain Lion" is for 2.7 (the only Python version Apple ships and supports).

Luckily, from my past tribolations I knew that Ronald had his own repository on BitBucket, so I tried that and it worked fine. However, the documentation on how to build PyObjC from source is quite scarce (in fine geek tradition), and I had to figure out the following principles in the hard way:

• Ronald's repository is split into many separate packages that have to be individually built. This is very fine-grained, but a bit cumbersome for the general case.
• Do not use the setup.py script you'll find under /pyobjc . These are just for people pulling from PyPI, i.e. post-release.
• /pyobjc-xcode is obsolete, and there's nothing to build there.
• /pyobjc-framework-XgridFoundation simply refuses to build under ML. Xgrid is a somewhat obscure, proprietary Apple technology for highly-parallel computation. If you don't know what it is, chances are that you won't need it. I personally don't care about it.
• /pyobjc-core is a requirement for all other packages, so it should be built first.
• In order of importance, /pyobjc-framework-Cocoa, -Quartz and -CoreData are dependencies of other packages, so they should be built in this order before any other pyobjc-framework-*.
• Python 3 support is occasionally shaky. In one occasion, one file had to be patched to remove unicode literals (the u'mystring' notation from Python 2 that was dropped in Python 3.0), but that's just a temporary snag: Python 3.3 will reintroduce that syntax as a compatibility hack for exactly this type of situation. I've submitted a patch anyway, but if you can't wait for Ronald to consider it, it is available in the below-mentioned repository.
• Looking at BitBucket, I noticed there's at least one significant fork that is arguably targeting Python 3 more consistently. You might want to try that if Ronald's version is not good enough for you.

Because I don't plan to do this sort of work every day, I've put together a script so that I won't have to remember all this stuff when starting a new virtualenv environment. It's now available from my utils repo on BitBucket. There is no documentation but OMG IT'S FULL OF COMMENTS so there. As usual, any feedback is more than welcome.