Build Instructions ------------------ I used SWIG (http://www.swig.org) to create the source code for the extension module. This enabled me to only have to deal with a small amount of code and only have to bother with the exceptional issues. SWIG takes care of the rest and generates all the repetative code for me. You don't need SWIG to build the extension module as all the generated C++ code is included under the src directory. I added a few minor features to SWIG to control some of the code generation. If you want to play around with this you will need to get a recent version of SWIG from their CVS or from a daily build. See http://www.swig.org/ for details. wxPython is organized as a Python package. This means that the directory containing the results of the build process should be a subdirectory of a directory on the PYTHONPATH. (And preferably should be named wxPython.) You can control where the build process will dump wxPython by setting the TARGETDIR variable for the build utility, (see below.) 1. Build and install wxWindows as described in its BuildCVS.txt or INSTALL.txt file. 1a. Building wxWindows on Unix/Linux/Etc. For *nix systems I run configure with these flags: --with-gtk --with-libjpeg --with-opengl --without-odbc --enable-unicode=no --enable-threads=yes --enable-socket=yes --enable-static=no --enable-shared=yes --disable-std_iostreams --enable-newgrid You can use whatever flags you want, but these work for me. If you want debug libraries, then you should add the "--enable-debug --enable-mem_tracing" flags. I reccommend creating an empty build directory, and then running make and configure from there. This makes it easy to experiment with different configure options without losing old builds. Be sure to run "make install" to install the wxWindows headers and shared library. You can check where the wxPython build will expect to find them by running "wx-config --cflags" and "wx-config --libs" 1b. Building wxWindows on Win32. For Win32 systems I use Visual C++ 6.0, but 5.0 should work. The wxPython build utility currently does not support any other win32 compilers. Be sure to copy include/wx/msw/setup0.h to include/wx/msw/setup.h and edit it for the options you want. At a minimum you should set the following: wxUSE_NEW_GRID 1 wxUSE_GLOBAL_MEMORY_OPERATORS 0 wxUSE_LIBTIFF 1 wxUSE_GLCANVAS 1 I also change these: wxUSE_DIALUP_MANAGER 0 wxUSE_DYNLIB_CLASS 0 wxUSE_DOC_VIEW_ARCHITECTURE 0 wxUSE_MDI_ARCHITECTURE 0 wxUSE_PLOT 0 wxUSE_POSTSCRIPT_ARCHITECTURE_IN_MSW 0 There are probably other flags that can be disabled to remove things not being used in wxPython, but I havn't investigated all the potential configurations yet. I find it easiest to build wxWindows using the makefiles, that way I don't have to worry about what the IDE might be doing behind the scenes that might screw things up. Simply go to the src/msw directory and run: nmake -f makefile.vc CRTFLAG=/MD EXTRAFLAGS=-D__NO_VC_CRTDBG__ dll pch If you want to make a release build, add FINAL=1 to the nmake command, as well as to build.local for wxPython, (see below.) 2. For the win32 platform you should be sure to set an environment variable named WXWIN to be the path to the top of the wxWindows source tree. 3. If you are working from a copy of the code retrieved from CVS, then you will find wxPython in $WXWIN/wxPython. If you are working from the tar.gz or .zip files then you will probably want to unpack wxPython in the $WXWIN directory and rename the new directory to wxPython (or use a symlink.) If you want to keep it in a separate directory then you can change where the build.py tool expects to find it by creating a file named build.local (see step 7 for more examples about build.local,) containing something like this: WXPSRCDIR = "~/MyStuff/wxPython-2.1.15/src" If your wxPython sources are not under $WXWIN then you'll need to adjust the remainder of these instructions accordingly. 4. At this point you may want to make an alias, symlink, script, batch file, or whatever on the PATH that invokes $WXWIN/wxPython/distrib/build.py to help simplify matters somewhat. For example, on my win32 system I have a file named build.bat in a directory on the PATH that contains: python %WXWIN%/wxPython/distrib/build.py %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 5. Change into the $(WXWIN)/wxPython/src directory. 6. If you don't use SWIG, or don't have a new enough version installed, you may have to update the timestamps of the files it generates so the make utility won't think they are out of date and try to run SWIG to update them. The standard touch utility can do this for you: touch gtk/*.cpp gtk/*.py or touch msw\*.cpp msw\*.py 7. Type "build -b" to build wxPython and "build -i" to install it. The build.py script actually generates a Makefile based on what it finds on your system and information found in the build.cfg file. If you have troubles building or you want it built or installed in a different way, take a look at the doc-string in build.py. You may be able to override configuration options in a file named build.local. For example, you can set a new TARGETDIR (the installation directory) just by creating a file named build.local in your wxPython source directory and assign a value to it, like this: TARGETDIR = "/usr/local/lib/python1.5/site-packages/wxPython" The build.local file is executed as Python code so you can do very creative things there if you need to. 8. To build and install the add-on modules, change to the appropriate directory under $WXWIN/wxPython/contrib and run the build utility again. 9. Change to the $WXWIN/wxPython/demo directory. 10. Try executing the demo program. For example: python demo.py To run it without requiring a console on win32, you can use the pythonw.exe version of Python either from the command line or from a shortcut.