Building wxPython 2.5 for Development and Testing ================================================= This file describes how I build wxWindows and wxPython while doing development and testing, and is meant to help other people that want to do the same thing. I'll assume that you are using either a CVS snapshot or a checkout from CVS. I'll also assume that you know what you are doing and so I may not be as detailed here as I am in other BUILD docs. If you want to make changes to any of the *.i files, or regenerate the extension sources or renamer modules, then you will need an up to date version of SWIG. Either get and build the current CVS version, or version 1.3.20 when it is released. If you install this build of SWIG to a location that is not on the PATH (so it doesn't interfere with an existing SWIG install for example) then you can set a setup.py command-line variable named SWIG to be the full path name of the executable and the wxPython build will use it. See below for an example. Building on Linux and OS X -------------------------- These two platforms are built almost the same way while in development so I'll combine the descriptions about their build process here. First we will build wxWindows and install it to an out of the way place, then do the same for wxPython. 1. Create a build directory in the main wxWindows dir, and configure wxWindows. If you want to have multiple builds with different configure options, just use different subdirectories. I normally put the configure command in a script named ".configure" in each build dir so I can easily blow away everything in the build dir and rerun the script without having to remember the options I used before:: mkdir bld cd bld ../configure --prefix=/opt/wx/2.5 \ --with-gtk \ --with-opengl \ --disable-monolithic \ --enable-debug \ --enable-geometry On OS X of course you'll want to use --with-mac instead of --with-gtk. For GTK2 and unicode add: --enable-gtk2 \ --enable-unicode Notice that I used a prefix of /opt/wx/2.5. You can use whatever path you want, even the standard ones if you like, but this lets me easily have multiple versions and ports of wxWindows "installed" and makes it easy to switch between them. 2. To build and install wxWindows you could just use "make" but there are other libraries that also need to be built so again I make a script to do it all for me so I don't forget anything. This time it is called ".make" (I use the leading ". so when I do "rm -r *" in my build dir I don't lose my scripts too.) This is what it looks like:: make $* \ && make -C contrib/src/gizmos $* \ && make -C contrib/src/ogl CXXFLAGS="-DwxUSE_DEPRECATED=0" $* \ && make -C contrib/src/stc $* \ && make -C contrib/src/xrc $* So you just use .make as if it where make, but don't forget to set the execute bit on .make first!:: .make .make install When it's done you should have an installed set of files under /opt/wx/2.5 containing just wxWindows. Now to use this version of wxWindows you just need to add /opt/wx/2.5/bin to the PATH and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH on OS X) to /opt/wx/2.5/lib. 3. I also have a script to help me build wxPython and it is checked in to the CVS as wxWindows/wxPython/b, but probably don't want to use it as it's very cryptic and expects that you want to run SWIG, so if you don't have the latest patched up version of SWIG then you'll probably get stuck. So I'll just give the raw commands instead. We're not going to install the development version of wxPython with these commands, so it won't impact your already installed version of the latest release. You'll be able test with this version when you want to, and use the installed release version the rest of the time. If you ever do want to install the development verison just use the normal distutils commands to do it. Make sure that the first wx-config found on the PATH is the one you installed above, and then change to the wxWindows/wxPython dir and run the this command:: cd wxPython python2.3 setup.py build_ext --inplace --debug If you are building with GTK2 then add the following flags to the command line:: WXPORT=gtk2 UNICODE=1 If you are wanting to have the source files regenerated with swig, then you need to turn on the USE_SWIG flag and optionally tell it where to find the new swig executable, so add these flags:: USE_SWIG=1 SWIG=/opt/swig/bin/swig When the setup.py command is done you should have fully populated wxPython and wx packages locally in wxWindows/wxPython/wxPython and .../wx, with all the extension modules (*.so files) located in the wx package. 4. To run code with the development verison of wxPython, just set the PYTHONPATH to the wxPython dir in the CVS tree. For example:: export LD_LIBRARY=/opt/wx/2.5/lib export PYTHONPATH=/myprojects/wxWindows/wxPython cd /myprojects/wxWindows/wxPython/demo python2.3 demo.py Building on Windows ------------------- The Windows builds currently require the use of Microsoft Visual C++. Theoretically, other compilers (such as mingw32 or the Borland compilers) can also be used but I've never done the work to make that happen. If you want to try that then first you'll want to find out if there are any tricks that have to be done to make Python extension modules using that compiler, and then make a few changes to setup.py to accomodate that. (And send the patches to me.) If you plan on using VisualStudio.Net (a.k.a. MSVC 7.1) keep in mind that you'll also have to build Python and any other extension modules that you use with that compiler because a different version of the C runtime likbrary is used. The Python executable that comes from PythonLabs and the wxPythons that I distribute are built with MSVC 6 with all the Service Packs applied. If you want to build a debugable version of wxWindows and wxPython you will need to have also built a debug version of Python and any other extension modules you need to use. You can tell if you have them already if there is a _d in the file names, for example python_d.exe or python23_d.dll. If you don't need to trace through the C/C++ parts of the code with the debugger then building the normal (or hybrid) version is fine, and you can use the regular python executables with it. Just like the unix versions I also use some scripts to help me build wxWindows, but I use some non-standard stuff to do it. So if you want to use them too you'll need to get a copy or 4DOS or 4NT from http://www.jpsoft.com/ and also a copy of unix-like cat and sed programs. You can also do by hand what my scripts are doing, but there are a lof steps involved and I won't be going into details here. There is a copy of my build scripts in wxWindows\wxPython\distrib\msw 1. Set an environment variable to the root of the wxWindows source tree:: set WXWIN=e:\projects\wxWindows 2. Copy setup0.h to setup.h cd %WXWIN%\include\wx\msw copy setup0.h setup.h 3. Edit setup.h and change a few settings. Some of them are changed by my build scripts depending on the type of build (debug/hybrid, unicode/ansi). I change a few of the other defaults to have these values:: wxDIALOG_UNIT_COMPATIBILITY 0 wxUSE_DEBUG_CONTEXT 1 wxUSE_MEMORY_TRACING 1 wxUSE_DIALUP_MANAGER 0 wxUSE_GLCANVAS 1 wxUSE_POSTSCRIPT 1 wxUSE_AFM_FOR_POSTSCRIPT 0 4. Make a %WXWIN%\BIN directory and add it to the PATH. My build scripts will copy the wxWindows DLLs there. 5. Change to the %WXWIN%\build\msw directory and copy my build scripts there. 6. Use the .make command to build wxWindows. It needs one command-line parameter which controls what kind of build(s) to do. Use one of the following:: debug Build debug version hybrid Build hybrid version both Both debug and hybrid debug-uni Build a debug unicode library hybrid-uni Hybrid unicode (see the pattern yet? ;-) both-uni and finally both unicode libraries For example:: .make hybrid 7. When that is done there should be a ton of DLLs in %WXDIR%\bin and lots of lib files and stuff in %WXDIR%\lib\vc_dll 8. Building wxPython on Windows is very similar to doing it for the unix systems. We're not going to install the development version of wxPython with these commands, so it won't impact your already installed version of the latest release. You'll be able test with this version when you want to, and use the installed release version the rest of the time. If you ever do want to install the development verison just use the normal distutils commands to do it. Change to the wxWindows\wxPython dir and run the this command:: cd %WXWIN%\wxPython python setup.py build_ext --inplace If you are wanting to have the source files regenerated with swig, then you need to turn on the USE_SWIG flag and optionally tell it where to find the new swig executable, so add these flags:: USE_SWIG=1 SWIG=e:\projects\SWIG-cvs\swig.exe If you have a debug version of Python and wxWindows and want to build a debug version of wxPython too, add the --debug flag to the command line. You should then end up with a set of *_d.pyd files in the wx package and you'll have to use python_d.exe to use them. The debug and hybrid(release) versions can coexist. When the setuyp.py command is done you should have fully populated wxPython and wx packages locally in wxWindows/wxPython/wxPython and .../wx, with all the extension modules (*.pyd files) located in the wx package. 9. To run code with the development verison of wxPython, just set the PYTHONPATH to the wxPython dir in the CVS tree. For example:: set PYTHONPATH=e:\projects\wxWindows\wxPython cd e:\projects\wxWindows\wxPython python demo.py