Thursday, December 14, 2006

There is a patch up that includes python 2.5. I have installed it and want to make a quick report.
The main implications include the facts that I...

  • Rely heavily on standard imported libraries.
  • Have lots of my personal modules containing generic utilities.
  • Program everything in python and need to compile exe files in many cases.
  • Utilize several open source libraries like PIL, pyserial, etc.
Before I installed the patch, I un-installed all python 2.2 libraries as well as python itself. I then installed the patch and played with vr a little to make sure that everything worked the way it should. Next I installed python 2.5 and my most used extra libraries (primarily pywin32, PIL, py2exe, pyserial). So far everything is working out fine except that I couldn't easily get py2exe to work the way it always did. I'll admit that I didn't spend a huge amount of time and it is my problem, I just got frustrated trying to figure out how to configure everything to eliminate the message "LoadLibrary(pythondll) failed" when running a program without the full path. It works fine on simple programs, but there is apparently something in the way I code that is causing problems.

While screwing around I found that pyinstaller worked fine for what I was doing and I was able to get it running in just a few minutes, so I'm going to migrate there for now.

So far I'm quite pleased with the results of the upgrade. I've got as much weird stuff going on as most people so if it works here, I would think it would work for most anyone and I would suggest going for it.

No major earth shattering changes but I like being on the latest python in case I find new libs I would like to use. I'll also toss out that in 2.5 ctypes is included in the standard install. My hope would be that this would make it possible for someone who knew what they were doing to use external DLLs. So if you know of a way to use the corpscon DLL to write a coordinate transformation function within program, I would love to hear from you.

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For anyone interested in trying VrPython for the first time or if you are early in the game, I suggest going to the earliest posts and working forward. I use VrPython every day for many wonderful things, needless to say it will change and could potentially damage a file. Any risk associated with using VrPython or any code or scripts mentioned here lies solely with the end user.

The "Personal VrPython page" in the link section will contain many code examples and an organized table of contents to this blog in a fairly un-attractive (for now) form.