It never fails (bsddb retirement in 2.3)

[Skip Montanaro]

    Nick> I'm going to save your message and see if time allows me to follow
    Nick> through. I'm also going to try Skip's suggestion of modifying
    Nick> Setup/Modules and site.py in combination to get the behavior I had
    Nick> in 2.2.2.

Actually, the preferred file to modify is sitecustomize.py.  That file is
not in the distribution.  It is imported from site.py (but fails silently if
missing).  Using sitecustomize.py insures your customization isn't blown
away by a later upgrade.  The new stuff I added to

    http://www.python.org/2.3/highlights.html

reflects this change.

    Nick> Wouldn't it make sense, to some degree, to require the _new_
    Nick> functionality use a new module name, instead of changing the
    Nick> behavior of an existing one?

The behavior of the module didn't change.  The underlying library required
did change.  That's why _bsddb wasn't built and the import from bsddb.py
failed.  We should look at tweaking the installation (perhaps by not
installing bsddb.py if _bsddb.c wasn't built).  It would be nice if setup.py
were modified to indicate what modules it decided not to build, perhaps with
reasons why.

Skip