1.6b1 joys & sorrows (was Re: Python 1.6b1 is released!)

[Alex Martelli]

>     http://www.python.org/1.6/

Licensing issues notwithstanding, this appears to be a truly
nifty little beta indeed.  Apparently, only the sources are
being released, no Windows installer for 1.6b1 (differently
from the alphas); so I had to get and unpack the sources and
build from them (following the instructions of course) -- no
glitch whatsoever on this part (using VC++6 SP4).  However,
there seems to be no automatic way after building to _install_
the thing on Windows; have I missed something, or do I have
to edit the registry manually, etc, etc...?

Further, there seems to be no fully automatic way to regression
test under Windows, either.  I did it manually and noticed a
glitch in test_math.py -- it unconditionally tests math.rint,
but as the docs make clear that method is only defined if it's
there in the underlying C libraries, and it's not there on
Windows, thus the math test fails.  No big issue, and I've
already submitted the bug to sourceforge (finding it pleasantly
simple to use), but it does suggest that regression tests are
not systematically run under Windows.  I still haven't looked
in depth at all the tests that are automatically skipped, but
it appears that those include quite a few for extensions which
I _have_, in fact, built (but apparently haven't figured out
how to tell regrtest that I have).

So, summing up -- mostly all-joys, just a few little sorrows on
Windows specifically.  Any docs I might have missed (either as
part of the tgz, or elsewhere on the web) to help complete the
_installation_ and testing, since the _build_ itself seems to
have just worked w/o problems...?  TIA!


Alex