This is Python version 2.6.4 ============================ Copyright (c) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 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 downloadable in HTML, PostScript, PDF, LaTeX, and reStructuredText (2.6+) formats; the LaTeX and reStructuredText versions are primarily for documentation authors, translators, and people with special formatting requirements. 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://bugs.python.org. Patches and contributions ------------------------- To submit a patch or other contribution, please use the Python Patch Manager at http://bugs.python.org. Guidelines for patch submission may be found at http://www.python.org/dev/patches/. If you have a proposal to change Python, you may want to send an email to the comp.lang.python or python-ideas mailing lists for inital feedback. A Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) may be submitted if your idea gains ground. All current PEPs, as well as guidelines for submitting a new PEP, are listed at http://www.python.org/dev/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 a...
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