[Python-Dev] Re: RELEASED Python 2.3.1

Fred L. Drake, Jr. fdrake at acm.org
Wed Oct 1 16:53:52 EDT 2003


Thomas Heller writes:
 > Now that I can build the docs on starship (thanks, Greg!) it's not
 > needed anymore to do it under Windows, but for the archives here are my
 > experiences:

I appreciate your taking the time!

 > Doing 'nmake pdf' (this is the MSVC6 make utility) in the src/Doc
 > directory worked, it created the pdf docs with MikTeX I had
 > installed. Maybe I had to trivially edit the Makefile (replace 'cp' with
 > 'copy' and such) before.

Most of the "cp" commands were removed as mkhowto became more capable,
are were replaced by calls to shutil.copyfile().  There are still a
few "cp" commands in the Makefile, though, and the "clean" target and
friends still us "rm".

 > It doesn't work anymore with the recent checkins to the Makefile it
 > didn't work anymore, although installing the Mingw32 gnumake helped.

That's expected, since it now uses the GNU-ish $(shell ...) syntax to
call an external script from Doc/tools/.  Removing this would require
even more painful gyrations to maintain the same functionality, or
would require that Python version numbers once more appear in the
documentation source tree.

 > Then I tried to bring 'make html' to work, installed latex2html (I have
 > Perl already), but this always complained about pnmtopng missing (or
 > something like that). And the make failed with an error such as 'image
 > format unsupported'. Well, I tried to find and install native windows
 > pnm2png and png2pnm tools, had to replace incompatible zlib.dll and so
 > on. It didn't work, instead it broke my ssh and maybe other stuff.

That's painful.  netpbm is a documented requirement for LaTeX2HTML,
but is a pain.  I had to install that from source under Cygwin.

 > At this point I gave up, removed the software, and be happy that I
 > managed to get my ssh working again.

That certainly sounds like a pain.  I'll think about what I can do to
make it easier, but I don't think it can take a high priority.  I'm
glad you got it working on Starship.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation



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