[Pythonmac-SIG] IDLE not working

[Ned Deily]

In article <BLU0-SMTP202CE31C5860BB7639DB113FAE30 at phx.gbl>,
 Catena Duscio <catena.duscio at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I have downloaded python 3.1 many times in the last coupe of days and each 
> time I can not get the IDLE to open. 

If you have downloaded Python 3.1.3 from the python.org website, try 
launching IDLE from a terminal shell window instead of double-clicking.  
In the shell, type:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.1/bin/idle3.1

If it fails, there should be a traceback printed which may give a clue 
as to the problem.  If it does not, then quit IDLE and launch by 
double-clicking on IDLE.app in the Finder.  You will then need to look 
in the system.log to see any error messages if IDLE fails to launch.  
The Console.app in /Applications/Utilities makes that easy to do.

One recently reported problem with IDLE 3.x is that it can crash if its 
Recent Files list contains files with non-ascii characters in their path 
names.  That can happen if you were using IDLE 2.x with such files, 
where this is no problem.  A workaround is to simply delete the recent 
file list before launching IDLE 3.x:

  rm ~/.idlerc/recent-files.lst

The problem and a fix for it is here:

http://bugs.python.org/issue10974

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org