2. Installing the XML Toolkit

Windows users should get the precompiled version at XXX; Mac users will use the corresponding precompiled version at XXX. Linux users may wish to use either the Debian package from XXX, or the RPM from XXX. To compile from source on a Unix platform, simply perform the following steps.

1.

Get a copy of the source distribution from http://www.python.org/topics/xml/download.html. Unpack it with the following command.

gzip -dc xml-package.tgz | tar -xvf -

2.

Run:

make -f Makefile.pre.in boot

This creates the "Makefile" and "config.c" (producing various other intermediate files in the process), incorporating the values for sys.prefix, sys.exec_prefix and sys.version from the installed Python binary. For this to work, the Python interpreter must be on your path. If this fails, try

   make -f Makefile.pre.in Makefile VERSION=1.5 installdir=<prefix>

where "<prefix>" is the value of "installdir" used when installing Python. You may possibly have to also set "exec_installdir" to the value of "exec_prefix".

3.

Once the Makefile has been constructed, just run "make" to compile the C modules. There's no test suite yet, but there will be one someday.

4.

To install the code, run "make install". The code will be installed under the "site-packages/" directory as a package named "xml/".

If you have difficulty installing this software, send a problem report to <xml-sig@python.org> describing the problem.

There are various demonstration programs in the "demo/" directory of the source distribution. You may wish to look at them next to get an impression of what's possible with the XML tools, and as a source of example code.