building/installing python libs/modules...

[Ravi Teja]

> i've got the python app:
> http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/downloads/libxml2dom-0.3.3.tar.gz
>
> and i've downloaded it, an untarred it...
> i have the dir structure, but i don't know what needs to be done now!!! i
> have a setup.py. does it get run?
>
> the Readme file didn't tell me how to build the app....

The setup.py is a distutils installer. The usual drill in that case is
to simply type "python setup.py install". If the module is registered
in PyPi (which this one is), you can just type "easy_install
libxml2dom" (after easy_install is setup) and you will not even need to
download and extract.

In this case, your module is a native wrapper. So you will need the
libraries that it provides a wrapper for, installed. In this case
(libxml2, libxml2dom). You will also need a C compiler.

All this can be trivial on a unix based platform. However, if you are
new and on Windows, this can be a hassle since you will have to
manually setup your C compiler and the dependencies. Try to find a
binary installer for native Python modules in MS Windows whenever you
can.

Here is a click and go installer built for Windows that I found from
Google.
http://users.skynet.be/sbi/libxml-python/binaries/libxml2-python-2.6.22.win32-py2.4.exe