This is Python version 2.5.1============================ Copyright (c) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Python Software Foundation. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2000 BeOpen.com.All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 1995-2001 Corporation for National Research Initiatives.All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum.All rights reserved. License information------------------- See the file "LICENSE" for information on the history of thissoftware, terms & conditions for usage, and a DISCLAIMER OF ALLWARRANTIES. This Python distribution contains no GNU General Public Licensed(GPLed) code so it may be used in proprietary projects just like priorPython distributions. There are interfaces to some GNU code but theseare entirely optional. All trademarks referenced herein are property of their respectiveholders. What's new in this release?--------------------------- See the file "Misc/NEWS". If you don't read instructions------------------------------ Congratulations on getting this far. :-) To start building right away (on UNIX): type "./configure" in thecurrent directory and when it finishes, type "make". This creates anexecutable "./python"; to install in /usr/local, first do "su root"and then "make install". The section `Build instructions' below is still recommended reading. What is Python anyway?---------------------- Python is an interpreted, interactive object-oriented programminglanguage suitable (amongst other uses) for distributed applicationdevelopment, scripting, numeric computing and system testing. Pythonis often compared to Tcl, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Visual Basic orScheme. To find out more about what Python can do for you, point yourbrowser to http://www.python.org/. How do I learn Python?---------------------- The official tutorial is still a good place to start; seehttp://docs.python.org/ for online and downloadable versions, as wellas a list of other introductions, and reference documentation. There's a quickly growing set of books on Python. Seehttp://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonBooks for a list. Documentation------------- All documentation is provided online in a variety of formats. Inorder of importance for new users: Tutorial, Library Reference,Language Reference, Extending & Embedding, and the Python/C API. TheLibrary Reference is especially of immense value since much ofPython's power is described there, including the built-in data typesand functions! All documentation is also available online at the Python web site(http://docs.python.org/, see below). It is available online foroccasional reference, or can be downloaded in many formats for fasteraccess. The documentation is available in HTML, PostScript, PDF, andLaTeX formats; the LaTeX version is primarily for documentationauthors, translators, and people with special formatting requirements. Unfortunately, new-style classes (new in Python 2.2) have not yet beenintegrated into Python's standard documentation. A collection ofpointers to what has been written is at: http://www.python.org/doc/newstyle.html Web sites--------- New Python releases and related technologies are published athttp://www.python.org/. Come visit us! There's also a Python community web site athttp://starship.python.net/. Newsgroups and Mailing Lists---------------------------- Read comp.lang.python, a high-volume discussion newsgroup aboutPython, or comp.lang.python.announce, a low-volume moderated newsgroupfor Python-related announcements. These are also accessible asmailing lists: see http://www.python.org/community/lists.html for anoverview of these and many other Python-related mailing lists. Archives are accessible via the Google Groups Usenet archive; seehttp://groups.google.com/. The mailing lists are also archived, seehttp://www.python.org/community/lists.html for details. Bug reports----------- To report or search for bugs, please use the Python BugTracker at http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?group_id=5470. Patches and contributions------------------------- To submit a patch or other contribution, please use the Python PatchManager at http://sourceforge.net/patch/?group_id=5470. Guidelinesfor patch submission may be found at http://www.python.org/patches/. If you have a proposal to change Python, it's best to submit a PythonEnhancement Proposal (PEP) first. All current PEPs, as well asguidelines for submitting a new PEP, are listed athttp://www.python.org/peps/. Questions--------- For help, if you can't find it in the manuals or on the web site, it'sbest to post to the comp.lang.python or the Python mailing list (seeabove). If you specifically don't want to involve the newsgroup ormailing list, send questions to help@python.org (a group of volunteerswho answer questions as they can). The newsgroup is the mostefficient way to ask public questions. Build instructions================== Before you can build Python, you must first configure it.Fortunately, the configuration and build process has been automatedfor Unix and Linux installations, so all you usually have to do istype a few commands and sit back. There are some platforms wherethings are not quite as smooth; see the platform specific notes below.If you want to build for multiple platforms sharing the same sourcetree, see the section on VPATH below. Start by running the script "./configure", which determines yoursystem configuration and creates the Makefile. (It takes a minute ortwo -- please be patient!) You may want to pass options to theconfigure script -- see the section below on configuration options andvariables. When it's done, you are ready to run make. To build Python, you normally type "make" in the toplevel directory.If you have changed the configuration, the Makefile may have to berebuilt. In this case you may have to run make again to correctlybuild your desired target. The interpreter executable is built in thetop level directory. Once you have built a Python interpreter, see the subsections below ontesting and installation. If you run into trouble, see the nextsection. Previous versions of Python used a manual configuration process thatinvolved editing the file Modules/Setup. While this file still existsand manual configuration is still supported, it is rarely needed anymore: almost all modules are automatically built as appropriate underguidance of the setup.py script, which is run by Make after theinterpreter has been built. Troubleshooting--------------- See also the platform specific notes in the next section. If you run into other trouble, see the FAQ(http://www.python.org/doc/faq) for hints on what can go wrong, andhow to fix it. If you rerun the configure script with different options, remove allobject files by running "make clean" before rebuilding. Believe it ornot, "make clean" sometimes helps to clean up other inexplicableproblems as well. Try it before sending in a bug report! If the configure script fails or doesn't seem to find things thatshould be there, inspect the config.log file. If you get a warning for every file about the -Olimit option being nolonger supported, you can ignore it. There's no foolproof way to knowwhether this option is needed; all we can do is test whether it isaccepted without error. On some systems, e.g. older SGI compilers, itis essential for performance (specifically when compiling ceval.c,which has more basic blocks than the default limit of 1000). If thewarning bothers you, edit the Makefile to remove "-Olimit 1500" fromthe OPT variable. If you get failures in test_long, or sys.maxint gets set to -1, youare probably experiencing compiler bugs, usually related tooptimization. This is a common problem with some versions of gcc, andsome vendor-supplied compilers, which can sometimes be worked aroundby turning off optimization. Consider switching to stable versions(gcc 2.95.2, gcc 3.x, or contact your vendor.) From Python 2.0 onward, all Python C code is ANSI C. Compiling usingold K&R-C-only compilers is no longer possible. ANSI C compilers areavailable for all modern systems, either in the form of updatedcompilers from the vendor, or one of the free compilers (gcc). If "make install" fails mysteriously during the "compiling the library"step, make sure that you don't have any of the PYTHONPATH or PYTHONHOMEenvironment variables set, as they may interfere with the newly builtexecutable which is compiling the library. Unsupported systems------------------- A number of features are not supported in Python 2.5 anymore. Somesupport code is still present, but will be removed in Python 2.6. If you still need to use current Python versions on these systems,please send a message to python-dev@python.org indicating that youvolunteer to support this system. For a more detailed discussion regarding no-longer-supported and resupporting platforms, as wellas a list of platforms that became or will be unsupported, see PEP 11. More specifically, the following systems are not supported anylonger:- SunOS 4- DYNIX- dgux- Minix- NeXT- Irix 4 and --with-sgi-dl- Linux 1- Systems defining __d6_pthread_create (configure.in)- Systems defining PY_PTHREAD_D4, PY_PTHREAD_D6, or PY_PTHREAD_D7 in thread_pthread.h- Systems using --with-dl-dld- Systems using --without-universal-newlines- MacOS 9 The following systems are still supported in Python 2.5, butsupport will be dropped in 2.6:- Systems using --with-wctype-functions- Win9x, WinME Warning on install in Windows 98 and Windows Me----------------------------------------------- Following Microsoft's closing of Extended Support forWindows 98/ME (July 11, 2006), Python 2.6 will stopsupporting these platforms. Python development andmaintainability becomes easier (and more reliable) whenplatform specific code targeting OSes with few usersand no dedicated expert developers is taken out. Thevendor also warns that the OS versions listed above"can expose customers to security risks" and recommendsupgrade. Platform specific notes----------------------- (Some of these may no longer apply. If you find you can build Pythonon these platforms without the special directions mentioned here,submit a documentation bug report to SourceForge (see Bug Reportsabove) so we can remove them!) GCC 4.1,GCC 4.2: There is a known incompatibility between Python and GCC, where GCC 4.1 and later uses an interpretation of C different to earlier GCC releases in an area where the C specification has undefined behaviour (namely, integer arithmetic involving -sys.maxint-1). As a consequence, compiling Python with GCC 4.1/4.2 is not recommended. It is likely that this problem will be resolved in future Python releases. As a work-around, it seems that adding -fwrapv to the compiler options restores the earlier GCC behaviour. Unix platforms: If your vendor still ships (and you still use) Berkeley DB 1.85 you will need to edit Modules/Setup to build the bsddb185 module and add a line to sitecustomize.py which makes it the default. In Modules/Setup a line like bsddb185 bsddbmodule.c should work. (You may need to add -I, -L or -l flags to direct the compiler and linker to your include files and libraries.) XXX I think this next bit is out of date: 64-bit platforms: The modules audioop, imageop and rgbimg don't work. The setup.py script disables them on 64-bit installations. Don't try to enable them in the Modules/Setup file. They contain code that is quite wordsize sensitive. (If you have a fix, let us know!) Solaris: When using Sun's C compiler with threads, at least on Solaris 2.5.1, you need to add the "-mt" compiler option (the simplest way is probably to specify the compiler with this option as the "CC" environment variable when running the configure script). When using GCC on Solaris, beware of binutils 2.13 or GCC versions built using it. This mistakenly enables the -zcombreloc option which creates broken shared libraries on Solaris. binutils 2.12 works, and the binutils maintainers are aware of the problem. Binutils 2.13.1 only partially fixed things. It appears that 2.13.2 solves the problem completely. This problem is known to occur with Solaris 2.7 and 2.8, but may also affect earlier and later versions of the OS. When the dynamic loader complains about errors finding shared libraries, such as ld.so.1: ./python: fatal: libstdc++.so.5: open failed: No such file or directory you need to first make sure that the library is available on your system. Then, you need to instruct the dynamic loader how to find it. You can choose any of the following strategies: 1. When compiling Python, set LD_RUN_PATH to the directories containing missing libraries. 2. When running Python, set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to these directories. 3. Use crle(8) to extend the search path of the loader. 4. Modify the installed GCC specs file, adding -R options into the *link: section. The complex object fails to compile on Solaris 10 with gcc 3.4 (at least up to 3.4.3). To work around it, define Py_HUGE_VAL as HUGE_VAL(), e.g.: make CPPFLAGS='-D"Py_HUGE_VAL=HUGE_VAL()" -I. -I$(srcdir)/Include' ./python setup.py CPPFLAGS='-D"Py_HUGE_VAL=HUGE_VAL()"' Linux: A problem with threads and fork() was tracked down to a bug in the pthreads code in glibc version 2.0.5; glibc version 2.0.7 solves the problem. This causes the popen2 test to fail; problem and solution reported by Pablo Bleyer. Red Hat Linux: Red Hat 9 built Python2.2 in UCS-4 mode and hacked Tcl to support it. To compile Python2.3 with Tkinter, you will need to pass --enable-unicode=ucs4 flag to ./configure. There's an executable /usr/bin/python which is Python 1.5.2 on most older Red Hat installations; several key Red Hat tools require this version. Python 2.1.x may be installed as /usr/bin/python2. The Makefile installs Python as /usr/local/bin/python, which may or may not take precedence over /usr/bin/python, depending on how you have set up $PATH. FreeBSD 3.x and probably platforms with NCurses that use libmytinfo or similar: When using cursesmodule, the linking is not done in the correct order with the defaults. Remove "-ltermcap" from the readline entry in Setup, and use as curses entry: "curses cursesmodule.c -lmytinfo -lncurses -ltermcap" - "mytinfo" (so called on FreeBSD) should be the name of the auxiliary library required on your platform. Normally, it would be linked automatically, but not necessarily in the correct order. BSDI: BSDI versions before 4.1 have known problems with threads, which can cause strange errors in a number of modules (for instance, the 'test_signal' test script will hang forever.) Turning off threads (with --with-threads=no) or upgrading to BSDI 4.1 solves this problem. DEC Unix: Run configure with --with-dec-threads, or with --with-threads=no if no threads are desired (threads are on by default). When using GCC, it is possible to get an internal compiler error if optimization is used. This was reported for GCC 2.7.2.3 on selectmodule.c. Manually compile the affected file without optimization to solve the problem. DEC Ultrix: compile with GCC to avoid bugs in the native compiler, and pass SHELL=/bin/sh5 to Make when installing. AIX: A complete overhaul of the shared library support is now in place. See Misc/AIX-NOTES for some notes on how it's done. (The optimizer bug reported at this place in previous releases has been worked around by a minimal code change.) If you get errors about pthread_* functions, during compile or during testing, try setting CC to a thread-safe (reentrant) compiler, like "cc_r". For full C++ module support, set CC="xlC_r" (or CC="xlC" without thread support). AIX 5.3: To build a 64-bit version with IBM's compiler, I used the following: export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/vacpp/bin ./configure --with-gcc="xlc_r -q64" --with-cxx="xlC_r -q64" \ --disable-ipv6 AR="ar -X64" make HP-UX: When using threading, you may have to add -D_REENTRANT to the OPT variable in the top-level Makefile; reported by Pat Knight, this seems to make a difference (at least for HP-UX 10.20) even though pyconfig.h defines it. This seems unnecessary when using HP/UX 11 and later - threading seems to work "out of the box". HP-UX ia64: When building on the ia64 (Itanium) platform using HP's compiler, some experience has shown that the compiler's optimiser produces a completely broken version of python (see http://www.python.org/sf/814976). To work around this, edit the Makefile and remove -O from the OPT line. To build a 64-bit executable on an Itanium 2 system using HP's compiler, use these environment variables: CC=cc CXX=aCC BASECFLAGS="+DD64" LDFLAGS="+DD64 -lxnet" and call configure as: ./configure --without-gcc then *unset* the environment variables again before running make. (At least one of these flags causes the build to fail if it remains set.) You still have to edit the Makefile and remove -O from the OPT line. HP PA-RISC 2.0: A recent bug report (http://www.python.org/sf/546117) suggests that the C compiler in this 64-bit system has bugs in the optimizer that break Python. Compiling without optimization solves the problems. SCO: The following apply to SCO 3 only; Python builds out of the box on SCO 5 (or so we've heard). 1) Everything works much better if you add -U__STDC__ to the defs. This is because all the SCO header files are broken. Anything that isn't mentioned in the C standard is conditionally excluded when __STDC__ is defined. 2) Due to the U.S. export restrictions, SCO broke the crypt stuff out into a separate library, libcrypt_i.a so the LIBS needed be set to: LIBS=' -lsocket -lcrypt_i' UnixWare: There are known bugs in the math library of the system, as well as problems in the handling of threads (calling fork in one thread may interrupt system calls in others). Therefore, test_math and tests involving threads will fail until those problems are fixed. QNX: Chris Herborth (chrish@qnx.com) writes: configure works best if you use GNU bash; a port is available on ftp.qnx.com in /usr/free. I used the following process to build, test and install Python 1.5.x under QNX: 1) CONFIG_SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash CC=cc RANLIB=: \ ./configure --verbose --without-gcc --with-libm="" 2) edit Modules/Setup to activate everything that makes sense for your system... tested here at QNX with the following modules: array, audioop, binascii, cPickle, cStringIO, cmath, crypt, curses, errno, fcntl, gdbm, grp, imageop, _locale, math, md5, new, operator, parser, pcre, posix, pwd, readline, regex, reop, rgbimg, rotor, select, signal, socket, soundex, strop, struct, syslog, termios, time, timing, zlib, audioop, imageop, rgbimg 3) make SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash or, if you feel the need for speed: make SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash OPT="-5 -Oil+nrt" 4) make SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash test Using GNU readline 2.2 seems to behave strangely, but I think that's a problem with my readline 2.2 port. :-\ 5) make SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash install If you get SIGSEGVs while running Python (I haven't yet, but I've only run small programs and the test cases), you'reLines 1–500 of 1297. 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This is Python version 2.5.1 ============================ Copyright (c) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Python Software Foundation. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2000 BeOpen.com. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 1995-2001 Corporation for National Research Initiatives. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum. All rights reserved. License information ------------------- See the file "LICENSE" for information on the history of this software, terms & conditions for usage, and a DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES. This Python distribution contains no GNU General Public Licensed (GPLed) code so it may be used in proprietary projects just like prior Python distributions. There are interfaces to some GNU code but these are entirely optional. All trademarks referenced herein are property of their respective holders. What's new in this release? --------------------------- See the file "Misc/NEWS". If you don't read instructions ------------------------------ Congratulations on getting this far. :-) To start building right away (on UNIX): type "./configure" in the current directory and when it finishes, type "make". This creates an executable "./python"; to install in /usr/local, first do "su root" and then "make install". The section `Build instructions' below is still recommended reading. What is Python anyway? ---------------------- Python is an interpreted, interactive object-oriented programming language suitable (amongst other uses) for distributed application development, scripting, numeric computing and system testing. Python is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Visual Basic or Scheme. To find out more about what Python can do for you, point your browser to http://www.python.org/. How do I learn Python? ---------------------- The official tutorial is still a good place to start; see http://docs.python.org/ for online and downloadable versions, as well as a list of other introductions, and reference documentation. There's a quickly growing set of books on Python. See http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonBooks for a list. Documentation ------------- All documentation is provided online in a variety of formats. In order of importance for new users: Tutorial, Library Reference, Language Reference, Extending & Embedding, and the Python/C API. The Library Reference is especially of immense value since much of Python's power is described there, including the built-in data types and functions! All documentation is also available online at the Python web site (http://docs.python.org/, see below). It is available online for occasional reference, or can be downloaded in many formats for faster access. The documentation is available in HTML, PostScript, PDF, and LaTeX formats; the LaTeX version is primarily for documentation authors, translators, and people with special formatting requirements. Unfortunately, new-style classes (new in Python 2.2) have not yet been integrated into Python's standard documentation. A collection of pointers to what has been written is at: http://www.python.org/doc/newstyle.html Web sites --------- New Python releases and related technologies are published at http://www.python.org/. Come visit us! There's also a Python community web site at http://starship.python.net/. Newsgroups and Mailing Lists ---------------------------- Read comp.lang.python, a high-volume discussion newsgroup about Python, or comp.lang.python.announce, a low-volume moderated newsgroup for Python-related announcements. These are also accessible as mailing lists: see http://www.python.org/community/lists.html for an overview of these and many other Python-related mailing lists. Archives are accessible via the Google Groups Usenet archive; see http://groups.google.com/. The mailing lists are also archived, see http://www.python.org/community/lists.html for details. Bug reports ----------- To report or search for bugs, please use the Python Bug Tracker at http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?group_id=5470. Patches and contributions ------------------------- To submit a patch or other contribution, please use the Python Patch Manager at http://sourceforge.net/patch/?group_id=5470. Guidelines for patch submission may be found at http://www.python.org/patches/. If you have a proposal to change Python, it's best to submit a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) first. All current PEPs, as well as guidelines for submitting a new PEP, are listed at http://www.python.org/peps/. Questions --------- For help, if you can't find it in the manuals or on the web site, it's best to post to the comp.lang.python or the Python mailing list (see above). If you specifically don't want to involve the newsgroup or mailing list, send questions to help@python.org (a group of volunteers who answer questions as they can). The newsgroup is the most efficient way to ask public questions. Build instructions ================== Before you can build Python, you must first configure it. Fortunately, the configuration and build process has been automated for Unix and Linux installations, so all you usually have to do is type a few commands and sit back. There are some platforms where things are not quite as smooth; see the platform specific notes below. If you want to build for multiple platforms sharing the same source tree, see the section on VPATH below. Start by running the script "./configure", which determines your system configuration and creates the Makefile. (It takes a minute or two -- please be patient!) You may want to pass options to the configure script -- see the section below on configuration options and variables. When it's done, you are ready to run make. To build Python, you normally type "make" in the toplevel directory. If you have changed the configuration, the Makefile may have to be rebuilt. In this case you may have to run make again to correctly build your desired target. The interpreter executable is built in the top level directory. Once you have built a Python interpreter, see the subsections below on testing and installation. If you run into trouble, see the next section. Previous versions of Python used a manual configuration process that involved editing the file Modules/Setup. While this file still exists and manual configuration is still supported, it is rarely needed any more: almost all modules are automatically built as appropriate under guidance of the setup.py script, which is run by Make after the interpreter has been built. Troubleshooting --------------- See also the platform specific notes in the next section. If you run into other trouble, see the FAQ (http://www.python.org/doc/faq) for hints on what can go wrong, and how to fix it. If you rerun the configure script with different options, remove all object files by running "make clean" before rebuilding. Believe it or not, "make clean" sometimes helps to clean up other inexplicable problems as well. Try it before sending in a bug report! If the configure script fails or doesn't seem to find things that should be there, inspect the config.log file. If you get a warning for every file about the -Olimit option being no longer supported, you can ignore it. There's no foolproof way to know whether this option is needed; all we can do is test whether it is accepted without error. On some systems, e.g. older SGI compilers, it is essential for performance (specifically when compiling ceval.c, which has more basic blocks than the default limit of 1000). If the warning bothers you, edit the Makefile to remove "-Olimit 1500" from the OPT variable. If you get failures in test_long, or sys.maxint gets set to -1, you are probably experiencing compiler bugs, usually related to optimization. This is a common problem with some versions of gcc, and some vendor-supplied compilers, which can sometimes be worked around by turning off optimization. Consider switching to stable versions (gcc 2.95.2, gcc 3.x, or contact your vendor.) From Python 2.0 onward, all Python C code is ANSI C. Compiling using old K&R-C-only compilers is no longer possible. ANSI C compilers are available for all modern systems, either in the form of updated compilers from the vendor, or one of the free compilers (gcc). If "make install" fails mysteriously during the "compiling the library" step, make sure that you don't have any of the PYTHONPATH or PYTHONHOME environment variables set, as they may interfere with the newly built executable which is compiling the library. Unsupported systems ------------------- A number of features are not supported in Python 2.5 anymore. Some support code is still present, but will be removed in Python 2.6. If you still need to use current Python versions on these systems, please send a message to python-dev@python.org indicating that you volunteer to support this system. For a more detailed discussion regarding no-longer-supported and resupporting platforms, as well as a list of platforms that became or will be unsupported, see PEP 11. More specifically, the following systems are not supported any longer: - SunOS 4 - DYNIX - dgux - Minix - NeXT - Irix 4 and --with-sgi-dl - Linux 1 - Systems defining __d6_pthread_create (configure.in) - Systems defining PY_PTHREAD_D4, PY_PTHREAD_D6, or PY_PTHREAD_D7 in thread_pthread.h - Systems using --with-dl-dld - Systems using --without-universal-newlines - MacOS 9 The following systems are still supported in Python 2.5, but support will be dropped in 2.6: - Systems using --with-wctype-functions - Win9x, WinME Warning on install in Windows 98 and Windows Me ----------------------------------------------- Following Microsoft's closing of Extended Support for Windows 98/ME (July 11, 2006), Python 2.6 will stop supporting these platforms. Python development and maintainability becomes easier (and more reliable) when platform specific code targeting OSes with few users and no dedicated expert developers is taken out. The vendor also warns that the OS versions listed above "can expose customers to security risks" and recommends upgrade. Platform specific notes ----------------------- (Some of these may no longer apply. If you find you can build Python on these platforms without the special directions mentioned here, submit a documentation bug report to SourceForge (see Bug Reports above) so we can remove them!) GCC 4.1, GCC 4.2: There is a known incompatibility between Python and GCC, where GCC 4.1 and later uses an interpretation of C different to earlier GCC releases in an area where the C specification has undefined behaviour (namely, integer arithmetic involving -sys.maxint-1). As a consequence, compiling Python with GCC 4.1/4.2 is not recommended. It is likely that this problem will be resolved in future Python releases. As a work-around, it seems that adding -fwrapv to the compiler options restores the earlier GCC behaviour. Unix platforms: If your vendor still ships (and you still use) Berkeley DB 1.85 you will need to edit Modules/Setup to build the bsddb185 module and add a line to sitecustomize.py which makes it the default. In Modules/Setup a line like bsddb185 bsddbmodule.c should work. (You may need to add -I, -L or -l flags to direct the compiler and linker to your include files and libraries.) XXX I think this next bit is out of date: 64-bit platforms: The modules audioop, imageop and rgbimg don't work. The setup.py script disables them on 64-bit installations. Don't try to enable them in the Modules/Setup file. They contain code that is quite wordsize sensitive. (If you have a fix, let us know!) Solaris: When using Sun's C compiler with threads, at least on Solaris 2.5.1, you need to add the "-mt" compiler option (the simplest way is probably to specify the compiler with this option as the "CC" environment variable when running the configure script). When using GCC on Solaris, beware of binutils 2.13 or GCC versions built using it. This mistakenly enables the -zcombreloc option which creates broken shared libraries on Solaris. binutils 2.12 works, and the binutils maintainers are aware of the problem. Binutils 2.13.1 only partially fixed things. It appears that 2.13.2 solves the problem completely. This problem is known to occur with Solaris 2.7 and 2.8, but may also affect earlier and later versions of the OS. When the dynamic loader complains about errors finding shared libraries, such as ld.so.1: ./python: fatal: libstdc++.so.5: open failed: No such file or directory you need to first make sure that the library is available on your system. Then, you need to instruct the dynamic loader how to find it. You can choose any of the following strategies: 1. When compiling Python, set LD_RUN_PATH to the directories containing missing libraries. 2. When running Python, set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to these directories. 3. Use crle(8) to extend the search path of the loader. 4. Modify the installed GCC specs file, adding -R options into the *link: section. The complex object fails to compile on Solaris 10 with gcc 3.4 (at least up to 3.4.3). To work around it, define Py_HUGE_VAL as HUGE_VAL(), e.g.: make CPPFLAGS='-D"Py_HUGE_VAL=HUGE_VAL()" -I. -I$(srcdir)/Include' ./python setup.py CPPFLAGS='-D"Py_HUGE_VAL=HUGE_VAL()"' Linux: A problem with threads and fork() was tracked down to a bug in the pthreads code in glibc version 2.0.5; glibc version 2.0.7 solves the problem. This causes the popen2 test to fail; problem and solution reported by Pablo Bleyer. Red Hat Linux: Red Hat 9 built Python2.2 in UCS-4 mode and hacked Tcl to support it. To compile Python2.3 with Tkinter, you will need to pass --enable-unicode=ucs4 flag to ./configure. There's an executable /usr/bin/python which is Python 1.5.2 on most older Red Hat installations; several key Red Hat tools require this version. Python 2.1.x may be installed as /usr/bin/python2. The Makefile installs Python as /usr/local/bin/python, which may or may not take precedence over /usr/bin/python, depending on how you have set up $PATH. FreeBSD 3.x and probably platforms with NCurses that use libmytinfo or similar: When using cursesmodule, the linking is not done in the correct order with the defaults. Remove "-ltermcap" from the readline entry in Setup, and use as curses entry: "curses cursesmodule.c -lmytinfo -lncurses -ltermcap" - "mytinfo" (so called on FreeBSD) should be the name of the auxiliary library required on your platform. Normally, it would be linked automatically, but not necessarily in the correct order. BSDI: BSDI versions before 4.1 have known problems with threads, which can cause strange errors in a number of modules (for instance, the 'test_signal' test script will hang forever.) Turning off threads (with --with-threads=no) or upgrading to BSDI 4.1 solves this problem. DEC Unix: Run configure with --with-dec-threads, or with --with-threads=no if no threads are desired (threads are on by default). When using GCC, it is possible to get an internal compiler error if optimization is used. This was reported for GCC 2.7.2.3 on selectmodule.c. Manually compile the affected file without optimization to solve the problem. DEC Ultrix: compile with GCC to avoid bugs in the native compiler, and pass SHELL=/bin/sh5 to Make when installing. AIX: A complete overhaul of the shared library support is now in place. See Misc/AIX-NOTES for some notes on how it's done. (The optimizer bug reported at this place in previous releases has been worked around by a minimal code change.) If you get errors about pthread_* functions, during compile or during testing, try setting CC to a thread-safe (reentrant) compiler, like "cc_r". For full C++ module support, set CC="xlC_r" (or CC="xlC" without thread support). AIX 5.3: To build a 64-bit version with IBM's compiler, I used the following: export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/vacpp/bin ./configure --with-gcc="xlc_r -q64" --with-cxx="xlC_r -q64" \ --disable-ipv6 AR="ar -X64" make HP-UX: When using threading, you may have to add -D_REENTRANT to the OPT variable in the top-level Makefile; reported by Pat Knight, this seems to make a difference (at least for HP-UX 10.20) even though pyconfig.h defines it. This seems unnecessary when using HP/UX 11 and later - threading seems to work "out of the box". HP-UX ia64: When building on the ia64 (Itanium) platform using HP's compiler, some experience has shown that the compiler's optimiser produces a completely broken version of python (see http://www.python.org/sf/814976). To work around this, edit the Makefile and remove -O from the OPT line. To build a 64-bit executable on an Itanium 2 system using HP's compiler, use these environment variables: CC=cc CXX=aCC BASECFLAGS="+DD64" LDFLAGS="+DD64 -lxnet" and call configure as: ./configure --without-gcc then *unset* the environment variables again before running make. (At least one of these flags causes the build to fail if it remains set.) You still have to edit the Makefile and remove -O from the OPT line. HP PA-RISC 2.0: A recent bug report (http://www.python.org/sf/546117) suggests that the C compiler in this 64-bit system has bugs in the optimizer that break Python. Compiling without optimization solves the problems. SCO: The following apply to SCO 3 only; Python builds out of the box on SCO 5 (or so we've heard). 1) Everything works much better if you add -U__STDC__ to the defs. This is because all the SCO header files are broken. Anything that isn't mentioned in the C standard is conditionally excluded when __STDC__ is defined. 2) Due to the U.S. export restrictions, SCO broke the crypt stuff out into a separate library, libcrypt_i.a so the LIBS needed be set to: LIBS=' -lsocket -lcrypt_i' UnixWare: There are known bugs in the math library of the system, as well as problems in the handling of threads (calling fork in one thread may interrupt system calls in others). Therefore, test_math and tests involving threads will fail until those problems are fixed. QNX: Chris Herborth (chrish@qnx.com) writes: configure works best if you use GNU bash; a port is available on ftp.qnx.com in /usr/free. I used the following process to build, test and install Python 1.5.x under QNX: 1) CONFIG_SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash CC=cc RANLIB=: \ ./configure --verbose --without-gcc --with-libm="" 2) edit Modules/Setup to activate everything that makes sense for your system... tested here at QNX with the following modules: array, audioop, binascii, cPickle, cStringIO, cmath, crypt, curses, errno, fcntl, gdbm, grp, imageop, _locale, math, md5, new, operator, parser, pcre, posix, pwd, readline, regex, reop, rgbimg, rotor, select, signal, socket, soundex, strop, struct, syslog, termios, time, timing, zlib, audioop, imageop, rgbimg 3) make SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash or, if you feel the need for speed: make SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash OPT="-5 -Oil+nrt" 4) make SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash test Using GNU readline 2.2 seems to behave strangely, but I think that's a problem with my readline 2.2 port. :-\ 5) make SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash install If you get SIGSEGVs while running Python (I haven't yet, but I've only run small programs and the test cases), you're