Python release 1.0.0 ==================== ==> This is the first "official" Python release in more than half a year. It's significantly improved, both at the functionality level and (especially) in portability of the source -- you should now be able to configure build this without manual intervention on almost any type of Unix system. It is known to work at least on IRIX 4 and 5, SunOS 4, Solaris 2, HP-UX, Ultrix, OSF/1, AIX, SCO ODT 3.0, minix, and through the use of automatic feature detection should work on most other Unix flavors (e.g. NeXT) as well. ==> If you don't know yet what Python is: it's an interpreted, extensible, embeddable, interactive, object-oriented programming language. For a quick summary of what Python can mean for a UNIX/C programmer, read Misc/BLURB.LUTZ. ==> If you want to start compiling right away: just type "./configure" in the current directory and when it finishes, type "make". See the section Build Instructions below for more details. ==> If you want to know what's new since release 0.9.9: read Misc/NEWS. Older history is in Misc/HISTORY. News since the release of 1.0.0 BETA (the first BETA release) is in ./ChangeLog. ==> All documentation is in the subdirectory Doc in the form of LaTeX files. In order of importance for new users: Tutorial (tut), Library Reference (lib), Language Reference (ref), Extending (ext). Note that especially the Library Reference is of immense value since much of Python's power (including the built-in data types and functions!) is described there. [XXX The ext document has not been updated to reflect this release yet.] ==> Python is COPYRIGHTED but free to use for all. See the copyright notice at the end of this file. Build instructions ------------------ Before you start building Python, you must first configure it. This entails (at least) running the script "./configure", which figures out your system configuration and creates several Makefiles. (This will take a minute or two -- please be patient!) When it is done, you are ready to run make. Typing "make" in the toplevel directory will recursively run make in each of the subdirectories Parser, Objects, Python and Modules, creating a library file in each one. The executable of the interpreter is built in the Modules subdirectory but moved up here when it is built. If you want or need to, you can also chdir into each subdirectory in turn and run make there manually (do the Modules subdirectory last!). EXCEPTIONS: on SVR4 derived systems, you need to pass the configure script the option --with-svr4. See below for more options you can pass to the configure script. AIX users: read the file Misc/AIX-NOTES before trying to build. You can configure the interpreter to contain fewer or more built-in modules by editing the file Modules/Setup. This file is initially copied (when the toplevel Makefile makes Modules/Makefile for the first time) from Setup.in; if it does not exist yet, make a copy yourself. Never edit Setup.in -- always edit Setup. Read the comments in the file for information on what kind of edits you can make. When you have edited Setup, Makefile and config.c in Modules will automatically be rebuilt the next time you run make in the toplevel directory. (There are some example Setup files which you may copy to Setup for specific systems; have a look at Setup.*.) To test the interpreter that you have just built, type "make test". This runs the test set silently, twice (once with no compiled files, once with the compiled files left by the previous test run). Each test run should print "All tests OK." and nothing more. (The test set does not test the built-in modules, but will find most other problems with the interpreter.) To install the interpreter as /usr/local/bin/python, type "make install". To install the library as /usr/local/lib/python, type "make libinstall". To install the manual page as /usr/local/man/man1/python.1, type "make maninstall". To install the Emacs editing mode for python, manually copy the file Misc/python-mode.el to your local Emacs lisp directory. The directory /usr/local can be overridden at configuration time by passing --prefix=DIRECTORY to the configure script, or at make time by passing "prefix=DIRECTORY" to make. See below for more information on --prefix. If you plan to do development of extension modules or to embed Python in another application and don't want to reference the original source tree, you can type "make inclinstall" and "make libainstall" to install the include files and lib*.a files, respectively, as /usr/local/include/Py/*.h and /usr/local/lib/python/lib/lib*.a. The make libainstall target also installs copies of config.h, Modules/config.c and Modules/Makefile, for the benefit of the mkext.py script used by the Extensions subtree (distributed separately, see below). To print the documentation, cd into the Doc subdirectory, type "make" (let's hope you have LaTeX installed!), and send the four resulting PostScript files (tut.ps, lib.ps, ref.ps, and ext.ps) to the printer. See the README file there; you can also build a texinfo version of the library manual and from that construct an Emacs info version (the hypertext format used by the Emacs "info" command) and an HTML version (the hypertext format used by the World Wide Web distributed information initiative). You don't need to have LaTeX installed for this. Note that the Python archive sites also carry the resulting PostScript files, in case you have a PostScript printer but not LaTeX. Some special cases are handled by passing environment variables or options to the configure script: - The configure script uses gcc (the GNU C compiler) if it finds it. If you don't want this, or if this compiler is installed but broken on your platform, pass "CC=cc" (or whatever the name of the proper C compiler is) in the environment. - On System V, Release 4 derived systems (e.g. SOLARIS 2, but not IRIX 5) you need to call the configure script with the option --with-svr4. This is needed so the libraries -lnsl and -lsocket are found. (On some other systems, e.g. IRIX 5, these libraries exist but are incompatible with other system libraries such as X11 and GL.) - If you want to install the binaries and the Python library somewhere else than in /usr/local/{bin,lib}, you can pass the option --prefix=DIRECTORY; the interpreter binary will be installed as DIRECTORY/bin/python and the library files as DIRECTORY/lib/python/*. If you pass --exec-prefix=DIRECTORY (as well) this overrides the installation prefix for architecture-dependent files (like the interpreter binary). Note that --prefix=DIRECTORY also affects the default module search path (sys.path), when Modules/config.c is compiled. Passing make the option prefix=DIRECTORY (and/or exec_prefix=DIRECTORY) overrides the prefix set at configuration time; this may be more convenient than re-running the configure script if you change your mind about the install prefix... - You can use the GNU readline library to improve the interactive user interface: this gives you line editing and command history when calling python interactively. You need to build the GNU readline library before running the configure script. Its sources are distributed with Python. This may involve some editing of the Makefile there -- I'm sorry, but I don't feel responsible for making it more portable or adapting it to autoconf... Pass the configure script the option --with-readline=DIRECTORY where DIRECTORY is the absolute pathname of the directory where you've built the readline library. A known problem with the readline library is that it contains entry points which cause conflicts with the STDWIN and SGI GL libraries. The stdwin conflict can be solved (and will be, in some future release of stdwin) by adding a line saying '#define werase w_erase' to the stdwin.h file (in the stdwin distribution, subdirectory H). The GL conflict may be solvable by reordering the -l options on the final link command, but it appears unsafe... - On SGI IRIX, and on Sun SOLARIS 2, you can use multiple threads. To enable this, pass --with-thread. In the Modules/Setup file, enable the thread module. (Threads aren't enabled automatically because there are run-time penalties when support for them is compiled in even if you don't use them.) - On SGI IRIX, there are modules that interface to many SGI specific system libraries, e.g. the GL library and the audio hardware. To enable these modules, you must edit the Modules/Setup file (or copy the Setup.irix4 file to it). - On SGI IRIX 4, dynamic loading of extension modules is supported by the "dl" library by Jack Jansen, which is ftp'able from ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/dynload/dl-1.6.tar.Z. This is enabled (after you've ftp'ed and compiled the dl library!) by passing --with-sgi-dl=DIRECTORY where DIRECTORY is the absolute pathname of the dl library. (Don't bother on IRIX 5, it already has dynamic linking using SunOS style shared libraries.) - Dynamic loading of modules is rumoured to be supported on some other systems: VAX (Ultrix), Sun3 (SunOS 3.4), Sequent Symmetry (Dynix), and Atari ST. This is done using a combination of the GNU dynamic loading package (ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/dynload/dl-dld-1.1.tar.Z) and an emulation of the SGI dl library mentioned above (the emulation can be found at ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/dynload/dld-3.2.3.tar.Z). To enable this, ftp and compile both libraries, then call the configure passing it the option --with-dl-dld=DL_DIRECTORY,DLD_DIRECTORY where DL_DIRECTORY is the absolute pathname of the dl emulation library and DLD_DIRECTORY is the absolute pathname of the GNU dld library. (Don't bother on SunOS 4 or 5, they already have dynamic linking using shared libraries.) - It is possible to specify alternative versions for the Math library (default -lm) and the C library (default the empty string) using the options --with-libm=STRING and --with-libc=STRING, respectively. E.g. if your system requires that you pass -lc_s to the C compiler to use the shared C library, you can pass --with-libc=-lc_s. These libraries are passed after all other libraries, the C library last. You can also build an "extended" interpreter, using modules that are not contained in the Modules directory. Extensions are distributed as a separate tar file (currently extensions.tar.Z). See the README file there. Building for multiple architectures ----------------------------------- If your file system is shared between multiple architectures, it usually is not necessary to make copies of the sources for each architecture you want to support. If the make program supports the VPATH feature, you can create an empty build directory for each architecture, and in each directory run the configure script (on the appropriate machine with the appropriate options). This creates the necessary subdirectories and the Makefiles therein. The Makefiles contain a line VPATH=... which points to directory containing the actual sources. To use the readline library in this case, you will have to create a subdirectory of your build directory called readline, copy readline/Makefile into it, edit the Makefile to contain a proper VPATH line (and possibly edit the compiler flags set in the Makefile), and pass the configure script a --with-readline=DIRECTORY option giving it the absolute (!) pathname of the readline build directory. Note that Modules/Makefile copies the original Setup file to the build directory if it finds no Setup file there. This means that you can edit the Setup file for each architecture independently. For this reason, subsequent changes to the original Setup file are not tracked automatically, as they might overwrite local changes. To force a copy of a changed original Setup file, delete the target Setup file. (The makesetup script supports multiple input files, so if you want to be fancy you can change the rules to create an empty Setup.local if it doesn't exist and run it with arguments $(srcdir)/Setup Setup.local; however this assumes that you only need to add modules.) Building on non-UNIX systems ---------------------------- On non-UNIX systems, you will have to fake the effect of running the configure script manually. A good start is to copy the file config.h.in to config.h and edit the latter to reflect the actual configuration of your system. Most symbols must simply be defined as 1 only if the corresponding feature is present and can be left alone otherwise; however RETSIGTYPE must always be defined, either as int or as void, and the *_t type symbols must be defined as some variant of int if they need to be defined at all. Then arrange that the symbol HAVE_CONFIG_H is defined during compilation (usually by passing an argument of the form `-DHAVE_CONFIG_H' to the compiler, but this is necessarily system-dependent). Distribution structure ---------------------- Most subdirectories have their own README file. Most files have comments. ChangeLog A raw list of changes since the first 1.0.0 BETA release Contrib/ Contributed code Demo/ Demonstration scripts, modules and programs Demo2/ Some more demonstrations (not distributed) Doc/ Documentation (in LaTeX) Ext-dummy/ Placeholder for Extensions in the distribution Extensions/ Extension modules (not distributed) Grammar/ Input for the parser generator Include/ Public header files Lib/ Python library modules Makefile Rules for building the distribution Misc/ Miscellaneous files Modules/ Implementation of most built-in modules Objects/ Implementation of most built-in object types Parser/ The parser and tokenizer and their input handling Python/ The "compiler" and interpreter README The file you're reading now acconfig.h Additional input for the autoheader program config.h Configuration header (generated) config.h.in Source from which config.status creates config.h config.status status from last run of configure script (generated) configure Configuration shell script (GNU autoconf output) configure.in Configuration specification (GNU autoconf input) tags, TAGS Tags files for vi and Emacs (generated) python The executable interpreter (generated) readline/ Source code for the GNU readline library Ftp access ---------- The latest Python source distribution can be ftp'ed from site ftp.cwi.nl (IP address 192.16.184.180), directory /pub/python, file python.tar.Z. Curerntly is 1.0.0. You can also find PostScript of the main Python documentation there, Macintosh and PC binaries, and the latest STDWIN source distribution (in directory /pub/stdwin). Mirror sites are gatekeeper.dec.com (/pub/plan/python/cwi), ftp.wustl.edu (/graphics/graphics/sgi-stuff/python) and ftp.uu.net (/languages/python) -- try these sites first if you are on the US continent, or at least closer to it than to Europe. These mirror sites are at most a day behind on the European archive! If you don't have ftp access, send mail containing only the word HELP to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com or bitftp@pucc.princeton.edu, and the server will send you instructions on how to make requests. Mailing list ------------ There is a mailing list devoted to Python programming, design and bugs. To subscribe, send mail containing your real name and e-mail address in Internet form to "python-list-request@cwi.nl". If you have built and installed Python, you are urgently to subscribe to this mailing list. Author ------ Guido van Rossum CWI, dept. CST P.O. Box 94079 1090 GB Amsterdam The Netherlands E-mail: Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl Copyright Notice ---------------- The Python source is copyrighted, but you can freely use and copy it as long as you don't change or remove the copyright: Copyright 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 by Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. All Rights Reserved Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the names of Stichting Mathematisch Centrum or CWI not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission. STICHTING MATHEMATISCH CENTRUM DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE, INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS, IN NO EVENT SHALL STICHTING MATHEMATISCH CENTRUM BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE. Signature --------- --Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam URL: