[Tutor] Python with readline

[dman]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 10:51:05PM -0400, Erik Price wrote:
| 
| On Wednesday, April 17, 2002, at 11:20  AM, dman wrote:
| 
| >Yeah, understanding the C compilation environment really does help in
| >these situations.
| 
| 
| >Where are your readline and termcap libraries installed?  What is the
| >error message the build process gives you?
| 
| Well, I have the following files with the word "termcap" on my system 
| (not including man pages):
| 
| /sw/include/termcap.h
| /System/Library/Perl/termcap.pl
| /usr/share/emacs/20.7/etc/termcap.src
| /usr/share/misc/termcap
| /usr/share/misc/termcap.db

No .so files?  They are always named libfoo.so, where 'foo' is the name
of the library.

| As to be expected, the man page assumes a priori knowledge of whatever 
| "termcap" is, so it's not very helpful.

termcap is the "TERMinal CAPability" database.  It lists the
capabilities and control characters for a variety of terminals.
(n)curses and readline (among others) use this to sanely handle the
wide variety of terminals and terminal emulators out there.  The
termcap db tells the app what characters/bytes to send to the terminal
to make the cursor and screen behave the way it wants.

| And I believe my readline library is /sw/include/readline (if the /sw/ 
| dir looks unfamiliar, it's the equivalent of /usr/local/ used by Fink, 
| the Unix ported package management app for Mac OS X).

The .h is the "include" file.  It is C source that is required for
compiling anything that uses the library.  The .so file is the "shared
library" file.  It is the already-compiled implementation of the
library.  The app (python in your case) will be dynamically linked
against that .so when it runs.

Stuff in /usr/share is typically just arbitrary data the app/lib uses
as it runs.

| >Do you have sshd running on your system?  (if so you can give someone
| >else shell access and they can work with the system to get it built)
| 
| Well... one can't be too paranoid when it comes to their system can 
| they... 

Not usually :-).

| I don't normally run this or many other services, and to be honest,
| while I'd like to get readline up and running, I'm note quite
| desperate enough to do it this way... :)

HTH,
-D

-- 

The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life,
turning a man from the snares of death.
        Proverbs 13:14