Add symlink to generalize macOS library pathname about cpython

[rprimmer]

Hi Ronald, thank you for your response, it cleared up some things.

Let me just start by making sure I wasn't ambiguous in my first note. I only created a symlink in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/lib; the symlink Current -> 3.12 in dir /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions
was already present as part of the python package install that I downloaded (for macOS) from python.org.

However, your question as to why I would even have need for adding the path in the first place made me realize I must have something wrong in my environment if others aren't seeing this issue on macOS.

After some digging, it turns out to be a toolchain issue. On this system I use python from the package downloaded from python.org. But there was some leftover stuff from homebrew on the same system. Homebrew downloads python3 as a dependency for some of its other packages, whether you explicitly download it yourself or not.

Once I uninstalled the brew pyinstaller it worked fine without having to set pathex=['/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.12/lib/python3.12/site-packages'] in the project.spec file.

Thank you for your clear explanation. It pointed me in the right direction to figure out the toolchain conflict.

[ronaldoussoren]

I'm -1 on this, the links in Python.framework are there to conform to platform conventions a "lib" or "bin" symlink doesn't conform to these conventions. Having the symlink can also lead to confusing behaviour when having multiple Python versions installed at the same time (as I commonly do).

Furthermore the library path can easily be retrieved using sysconfig.get_paths(), and that works on all platforms.

BTW. Are you sure you need to specify a path to the site-packages directory? I'd expect that pyinstaller can find that on its own.