Learning Python

Appendix B. Platform-Specific Topics

This appendix covers platform-specific topics—where to get distributions of Python for each specific platform (i.e., combination of hardware and operating system), and any important notes regarding compatibility or availability of tools specific to your platform.

Unix

Python’s largest user base is most likely Unix users these days, although the number of Windows users is growing steadily. There are several distributions available for Unix. The standard method of obtaining Python is to download the source distribution (http://www.python.org/download/download_source.html ), and configure, build, and install Python yourself. There was an effort a while back to keep at the Python web site a set of precompiled binaries of Python for most of the major Unix platforms, but this effort has mostly been dropped, because there was no way to make it maintainable; there are too many different versions of Unix and too many ways to configure Python for each one.

We haven’t mentioned configurations of Python in this book; that’s because we’ve mostly covered the most standard part of the Python distribution. Someone who downloads the source distribution, however, will soon notice a references to a file called Setup in the Modules directory. This file allows you to configure which modules are compiled, either for static or for dynamic linking. The set of available optional modules changes with each release and can be augmented by downloading third-party extensions. ...