[Clipart] SVGscan

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

"Stephen Silver" <ocalocal at btinternet.com> writes:

> There should also be a file called svgdata.py.

Umm...  Oh, yeah, that just didn't get moved into the directory with
the other things.  (I had expected the zipfile to unzip into a
subdirectory, but it just dumped the files loose in the current
directory.)

> >     from decimals import (parse_decimal, simplify_decimal)
> >                          ^
> > SyntaxError: invalid syntax
> 
> I think this means that you're using an old version of Python.  Try
> 
>   python -V
> 
> to see what version you've got.  

It appears that I have Python 2.3.5, despite that 2.4.1 is about two
months older than the release of the distribution I'm using.

> SVGscan needs Python 2.4.

I looked at the Python home page, but the only packages they appear to
offer are Win32 and source.  How much of a pain is Python to compile
from source?  Can I expect the following to Just Work(TM):
./configure --prefix=/usr ; make; make install

Or is it going to be more complicated and/or require a bunch of
dependencies?  Will I find myself having to track down eighty dev
packages for all the libraries on my system?  (GTK is a really serious
pain to upgrade like that, but fortunately the GTK version you list is
the version I have already, so I'm good there.)

> I could change the above so that it would work with older versions
> of Python, but SVGscan really needs Python 2.4 anyway, because in
> earlier versions xml.parsers.expat didn't have the CurrentLineNumber
> and CurrentColumnNumber that I use for reporting the location of
> problems.

Wait a second...  Python puts the XML parser in core, so that it can't
be upgraded independently?  Really?  I knew Python isn't Perl, but I
had assumed it was rather better thought-through than that.  I must be
misunderstanding something, surely...  ?

Wow, and I was feeling bad because I'd started using the "new",
three-argument version of open that was introduced, when, in Perl 5.6?
I was concerned that using that might turn away some 5.005 users...

-- 
Open Clip Art Library:  Drawing Together
http://www.openclipart.org/