Building Python using VC++ 8.0 ------------------------------------- This directory is used to build Python for Win32 platforms, e.g. Windows 95, 98 and NT. It requires Microsoft Visual C++ 8.0 (a.k.a. Visual Studio 2005). There are two Platforms defined, Win32 and x64. (For other Windows platforms and compilers, see ../PC/readme.txt.) All you need to do is open the workspace "pcbuild.sln" in MSVC++, select the Debug or Release setting (using "Solution Configuration" from the "Standard" toolbar"), and build the solution. A .bat file, build.bat, is provided to simplify command line builds. Some of the subprojects rely on external libraries and won't build unless you have them installed. Binary files go into PCBuild8\$(PlatformName)($ConfigurationName), which will be something like Win32Debug, Win32Release, x64Release, etc. When using the Debug setting, the output files have a _d added to their name: python25_d.dll, python_d.exe, parser_d.pyd, and so on. PROFILER GUIDED OPTIMIZATION ---------------------------- There are two special solution configurations for Profiler Guided Optimization. Careful use of this has been shown to yield more than 10% extra speed. 1) Build the PGInstrument solution configuration. This will yield binaries in the win32PGO or x64PGO folders. (You may want do start by erasing any .pgc files there, present from earlier runs.) 2) Instrument the binaries. Do this by for example running the test suite: win32PGO\python.exe ..\lib\test\regrtest.py. This will excercise python thoroughly. 3) Build the PGUpdate solution configuration (You may need to ask it to rebuild.) This will incorporate the information gathered in step 2 and produce new binaries in the same win32PGO or x64pPGO folders. 4) (optional) You can continue to build the PGUpdate configuration as you work on python. It will continue to use the data from step 2, even if you add or modify files as part of your work. Thus, it makes sense to run steps 1 and 2 maybe once a week, and then use step 3) for all regular work. A .bat file, build_pgo.bat is included to automate this process You can convince yourself of the benefits of the PGO by comparing the results of the python testsuite with the regular Release build. C RUNTIME --------- Visual Studio 2005 uses version 8 of the C runtime. The executables are linked to a CRT "side by side" assembly which must be present on the target machine. This is avalible under the VC/Redist folder of your visual studio distribution. Note that ServicePack1 of Visual Studio 2005 has a different version than the original. On XP and later operating systems that support side-by-side assemblies it is not enough to have the msvcrt80.dll present, it has to be there as a whole assembly, that is, a folder with the .dll and a .manifest. Also, a check is made for the correct version. Therefore, one should distribute this assembly with the dlls, and keep it in the same directory. For compatibility with older systems, one should also set the PATH to this directory so that the dll can be found. For more info, see the Readme in the VC/Redist folder. SUBPROJECTS ----------- These subprojects should build out of the box. Subprojects other than the main ones (pythoncore, python, pythonw) generally build a DLL (renamed to .pyd) from a specific module so that users don't have to load the code supporting that module unless they import the module. pythoncore .dll and .lib python .exe pythonw pythonw.exe, a variant of python.exe that doesn't pop up a DOS box _socket socketmodule.c _testcapi tests of the Python C API, run via Lib/test/test_capi.py, and implemented by module Modules/_testcapimodule.c pyexpat Python wrapper for accelerated XML parsing, which incorporates stable code from the Expat project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/expat/ select selectmodule.c unicodedata large tables of Unicode data winsound play sounds (typically .wav files) under Windows Note: Check the dependencies of subprojects when building a subproject. You need to manually build each of the dependencies, in order, first. A good example of this is the pythoncore subproject. It is dependent on both the make_versioninfo and the make_buildinfo subprojects. You can check the build order by right clicking on the project name, in the solution explorer, and selecting the project build order item. The following subprojects will generally NOT build out of the box. They wrap code Python doesn't control, and you'll need to download the base packages first and unpack them into siblings of PCbuilds's parent directory; for example, if your PCbuild is .......\dist\src\PCbuild\, unpack into new subdirectories of dist\. _tkinter Python wrapper for the Tk windowing system. Requires building Tcl/Tk first. Following are instructions for Tcl/Tk 8.4.12. Get source ---------- In the dist directory, run svn export http://svn.python.org/projects/external/tcl8.4.12 svn export http://svn.python.org/projects/external/tk8.4.12 svn export http://svn.python.org/projects/external/tix-8.4.0 Build Tcl first (done here w/ MSVC 7.1 on Windows XP) --------------- Use "Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 -> Visual Studio .NET Tools -> Visual Studio .NET 2003 Command Prompt" to get a shell window with the correct environment settings cd dist\tcl8.4.12\win nmake -f makefile.vc nmake -f makefile.vc INSTALLDIR=..\..\tcltk install XXX Should we compile with OPTS=threads? Optional: run tests, via nmake -f makefile.vc test On WinXP Pro, wholly up to date as of 30-Aug-2004: all.tcl: Total 10678 Passed 9969 Skipped 709 Failed 0 Sourced 129 Test Files. Build Tk -------- cd dist\tk8.4.12\win nmake -f makefile.vc TCLDIR=..\..\tcl8.4.12 nmake -f makefile.vc TCLDIR=..\..\tcl8.4.12 INSTALLDIR=..\..\tcltk install XXX Should we compile with OPTS=threads? XXX Our installer copies a lot of stuff out of the Tcl/Tk install XXX directory. Is all of that really needed for Python use of Tcl/Tk? Optional: run tests, via nmake -f makefile.vc TCLDIR=..\..\tcl8.4.12 test On WinXP Pro, wholly up to date as of 30-Aug-2004: all.tcl: Total 8420 Passed 6826 Skipped 1581 Failed 13 Sourced 91 Test Files. Files with failing tests: canvImg.test scrollbar.test textWind.test winWm.test Built Tix --------- cd dist\tix-8.4.0\win nmake -f python.mak nmake -f python.mak install bz2 Python wrapper for the libbz2 compression library. Homepage http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2/ Download the source from the python.org copy into the dist directory: svn export http://svn.python.org/projects/external/bzip2-1.0.3 A custom pre-link step in the bz2 project settings should manage to build bzip2-1.0.3\libbz2.lib by magic before bz2.pyd (or bz2_d.pyd) is linked in PCbuild\. However, the bz2 project is not smart enough to remove anything under bzip2-1.0.3\ when you do a clean, so if you want to rebuild bzip2.lib you need to clean up bzip2-1.0.3\ by hand. The build step shouldn't yield any warnings or errors, and should end by displaying 6 blocks each terminated with FC: no differences encountered All of this managed to build bzip2-1.0.3\libbz2.lib, which the Python project links in. _bsddb To use the version of bsddb that Python is built with by default, invoke (in the dist directory) svn export http://svn.python.org/projects/external/db-4.4.20 Then open a VS.NET 2003 shell, and invoke: devenv db-4.4.20\build_win32\Berkeley_DB.sln /build Release /project db_static and do that a second time for a Debug build too: devenv db-4.4.20\build_win32\Berkeley_DB.sln /build Debug /project db_static Alternatively, if you want to start with the original sources, go to Sleepycat's download page: http://www.sleepycat.com/downloads/releasehistorybdb.html and download version 4.4.20. With or without strong cryptography? You can choose either with or without strong cryptography, as per the instructions below. By default, Python is built and distributed WITHOUT strong crypto. Unpack the sources; if you downloaded the non-crypto version, rename the directory from db-4.4.20.NC to db-4.4.20. Now apply any patches that apply to your version. Open dist\db-4.4.20\docs\index.html and follow the "Windows->Building Berkeley DB with Visual C++ .NET" instructions for building the Sleepycat software. Note that Berkeley_DB.dsw is in the build_win32 subdirectory. Build the "db_static" project, for "Release" mode. To run extensive tests, pass "-u bsddb" to regrtest.py. test_bsddb3.py is then enabled. Running in verbose mode may be helpful. XXX The test_bsddb3 tests don't always pass, on Windows (according to XXX me) or on Linux (according to Barry). (I had much better luck XXX on Win2K than on Win98SE.) The common failure mode across platforms XXX is XXX DBAgainError: (11, 'Resource temporarily unavailable -- unable XXX to join the environment') XXX XXX and it appears timing-dependent. On Win2K I also saw this once: XXX XXX test02_SimpleLocks (bsddb.test.test_thread.HashSimpleThreaded) ... XXX Exception in thread reader 1: XXX Traceback (most recent call last): XXX File "C:\Code\python\lib\threading.py", line 411, in __bootstrap XXX self.run() XXX File "C:\Code\python\lib\threading.py", line 399, in run XXX apply(self.__target, self.__args, self.__kwargs) XXX File "C:\Code\python\lib\bsddb\test\test_thread.py", line 268, in XXX readerThread XXX rec = c.next() XXX DBLockDeadlockError: (-30996, 'DB_LOCK_DEADLOCK: Locker killed XXX to resolve a deadlock') XXX XXX I'm told that DBLockDeadlockError is expected at times. It XXX doesn't cause a test to fail when it happens (exceptions in XXX threads are invisible to unittest). Building for Win64: - open a VS.NET 2003 command prompt - run the SDK setenv.cmd script, passing /RETAIL and the target architecture (/SRV64 for Itanium, /X64 for AMD64) - build BerkeleyDB with the solution configuration matching the target ("Release IA64" for Itanium, "Release AMD64" for AMD64), e.g. devenv db-4.4.20\build_win32\Berkeley_DB.sln /build "Release AMD64" /project db_static /useenv _sqlite3 Python wrapper for SQLite library. Get the source code through svn export http://svn.python.org/projects/external/sqlite-source-3.3.4 To use the extension module in a Python build tree, copy sqlite3.dll into the PCbuild folder. _ssl Python wrapper for the secure sockets library. Get the source code through svn export http://svn.python.org/projects/external/openssl-0.9.8a Alternatively, get the latest version from http://www.openssl.org. You can (theoretically) use any version of OpenSSL you like - the build process will automatically select the latest version. You must also install ActivePerl from http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/ as this is used by the OpenSSL build process. Complain to them . The MSVC project simply invokes PCBuild/build_ssl.py to perform the build. This Python script locates and builds your OpenSSL installation, then invokes a simple makefile to build the final .pyd. build_ssl.py attempts to catch the most common errors (such as not being able to find OpenSSL sources, or not being able to find a Perl that works with OpenSSL) and give a reasonable error message. If you have a problem that doesn't seem to be handled correctly (eg, you know you have ActivePerl but we can't find it), please take a peek at build_ssl.py and suggest patches. Note that build_ssl.py should be able to be run directly from the command-line. build_ssl.py/MSVC isn't clever enough to clean OpenSSL - you must do this by hand. Building for AMD64 ------------------ Select x64 as the destination platform. YOUR OWN EXTENSION DLLs ----------------------- If you want to create your own extension module DLL, there's an example with easy-to-follow instructions in ../PC/example/; read the file readme.txt there first. Also, you can simply use Visual Studio to "Add new project to solution". Elect to create a win32 project, .dll, empty project. This will create a subdirectory with a .vcproj file in it. Now, You can simply copy most of another .vcproj, like _test_capi/_test_capi.vcproj over (you can't just copy and rename it, since the target will have a unique GUID.) At some point we want to be able to provide a template for creating a project.