"Chris Mellon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: [...] > These modules exist, but aren't that common. Certainly anything you're > likely to be using in an introductory compsci course is well packaged. > And even if it's not, it's really not that hard to create packages or > installers - a days work of course prep would take care of the > potential problem.
"A day's worth of course prep" for beginners would let them debug all the crap that building MySQLdb on Windows might throw at them, for example? I think not! (MySQLdb, last time I looked, was one of the not-so-obscure modules that don't have a Windows installer available and kept up to date. Maybe it does now, but that's not really the point.) I certainly don't recognise what some people have been saying, though. It's a rare thing that I have any real pain installing a Python module on Linux. That's not to say you don't need some background knowledge about distributions and Python if doing it "by hand", of course (rather than with a packaging tool like apt-get). Occasionally you'll want the newest version of something, which will in turn occasionally get you into some grim automake issue or similar. But all of this can be entirely avoided in an introductory course -- simply restrict yourself to what can be installed with apt-get (if the instructor feels they *must* make some new library available, they can always package it themselves). John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list