A few random updates to make things less horrifyingly out of date.

Delete some advice that can never, ever have worked.

There are a couple of XXX comments for bits I don't know how to
update.  It would be really good not to release Python 2.5 with these
in place :)

This file is way too big.  There's basically no chance of it staying
up to date.

diff --git a/README b/README
index a696738be097251ac2b675776ee91962a1bbad6b..dedd3bd2e457db8cd25d8233cea4563daa6fe50a 100644 (file)
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -35,6 +35,7 @@ What's new in this release?
 
 See the file "Misc/NEWS".
 
+
 If you don't read instructions
 ------------------------------
 
@@ -45,30 +46,29 @@ current directory and when it finishes, type "make".  This creates an
 executable "./python"; to install in /usr/local, first do "su root"
 and then "make install".
 
-The section `Build instructions' below is still recommended reading,
-especially the part on customizing Modules/Setup.
+The section `Build instructions' below is still recommended reading.
 
 
 What is Python anyway?
 ----------------------
 
-Python is an interpreted object-oriented programming language suitable
-(amongst other uses) for distributed application development,
-scripting, numeric computing and system testing.  Python is often
-compared to Tcl, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Visual Basic or Scheme.  To
-find out more about what Python can do for you, point your browser to
-http://www.python.org/.
+Python is an interpreted, interactive object-oriented programming
+language suitable (amongst other uses) for distributed application
+development, scripting, numeric computing and system testing.  Python
+is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Visual Basic or
+Scheme.  To find out more about what Python can do for you, point your
+browser to http://www.python.org/.
 
 
 How do I learn Python?
 ----------------------
 
 The official tutorial is still a good place to start; see
-http://www.python.org/doc/ for online and downloadable versions, as
-well as a list of other introductions, and reference documentation.
+http://docs.python.org/ for online and downloadable versions, as well
+as a list of other introductions, and reference documentation.
 
 There's a quickly growing set of books on Python.  See
-http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/PythonBooks for a list.
+www.python.org/moin/PythonBooks for a list.
 
 
 Documentation
@@ -82,16 +82,17 @@ Python's power is described there, including the built-in data types
 and functions!
 
 All documentation is also available online at the Python web site
-(http://www.python.org/doc/, see below).  It is available online for
+(http://docs.python.org/, see below).  It is available online for
 occasional reference, or can be downloaded in many formats for faster
 access.  The documentation is available in HTML, PostScript, PDF, and
 LaTeX formats; the LaTeX version is primarily for documentation
 authors, translators, and people with special formatting requirements.
 
-The best documentation for the new (in Python 2.2) type/class
-unification features is Guido's tutorial introduction, at
+Unfortunately, new-style classes (new in Python 2.2) have not yet been
+integrated into Python's standard documention.  A collection of
+pointers to what has been written is at:
 
-    http://www.python.org/2.2.1/descrintro.html
+    http://www.python.org/doc/newstyle.html
 
 
 Web sites
@@ -110,12 +111,12 @@ Newsgroups and Mailing Lists
 Read comp.lang.python, a high-volume discussion newsgroup about
 Python, or comp.lang.python.announce, a low-volume moderated newsgroup
 for Python-related announcements.  These are also accessible as
-mailing lists: see http://www.python.org/psa/MailingLists.html for an
-overview of the many Python-related mailing lists.
+mailing lists: see http://www.python.org/community/lists.html for an
+overview of these and many other Python-related mailing lists.
 
 Archives are accessible via the Google Groups usenet archive; see
 http://groups.google.com/.  The mailing lists are also archived, see
-http://www.python.org/psa/MailingLists.html for details.
+http://www.python.org/community/lists.html for details.
 
 
 Bug reports
@@ -135,7 +136,7 @@ for patch submission may be found at http://www.python.org/patches/.
 If you have a proposal to change Python, it's best to submit a Python
 Enhancement Proposal (PEP) first.  All current PEPs, as well as
 guidelines for submitting a new PEP, are listed at
-http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/.
+http://www.python.org/peps/.
 
 
 Questions
@@ -189,10 +190,9 @@ Troubleshooting
 
 See also the platform specific notes in the next section.
 
-If you run into other trouble, see section 3 of the FAQ
-(http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw.py or
-http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html) for hints on what can go wrong,
-and how to fix it.
+If you run into other trouble, see the FAQ
+(http://www.python.org/doc/faq) for hints on what can go wrong, and
+how to fix it.
 
 If you rerun the configure script with different options, remove all
 object files by running "make clean" before rebuilding.  Believe it or
@@ -200,8 +200,7 @@ not, "make clean" sometimes helps to clean up other inexplicable
 problems as well.  Try it before sending in a bug report!
 
 If the configure script fails or doesn't seem to find things that
-should be there, inspect the config.log file.  When you fix a
-configure problem, be sure to remove config.cache!
+should be there, inspect the config.log file.
 
 If you get a warning for every file about the -Olimit option being no
 longer supported, you can ignore it.  There's no foolproof way to know
@@ -227,8 +226,10 @@ compilers from the vendor, or one of the free compilers (gcc).
 Unsupported systems
 -------------------
 
+XXX This section is out of date!
+
 A number of features are not supported in Python 2.3 anymore. Some
-support code is still present, but will be removed in Python 2.4.
+support code is still present, but will be removed in Python 2.4. 
 If you still need to use current Python versions on these systems,
 please send a message to python-dev@python.org indicating that you
 volunteer to support this system.
@@ -263,12 +264,9 @@ Unix platforms: If your vendor still ships (and you still use) Berkeley DB
            bsddb185 bsddbmodule.c
 
        should work.  (You may need to add -I, -L or -l flags to direct the
-       compiler and linker to your include files and libraries.)  You can
-       then force it to be the version people import by adding
+       compiler and linker to your include files and libraries.)
 
-           import bsddb185 as bsddb
-
-       in sitecustomize.py.
+XXX I think this next bit is out of date:
 
 64-bit platforms: The modules audioop, imageop and rgbimg don't work.
        The setup.py script disables them on 64-bit installations.
@@ -295,8 +293,8 @@ Solaris: When using Sun's C compiler with threads, at least on Solaris
        When the dynamic loader complains about errors finding shared
        libraries, such as
 
-       ld.so.1: ./python: fatal: libstdc++.so.5: open failed: 
-       No such file or directory 
+       ld.so.1: ./python: fatal: libstdc++.so.5: open failed:
+       No such file or directory
 
        you need to first make sure that the library is available on
        your system. Then, you need to instruct the dynamic loader how
@@ -314,13 +312,9 @@ Linux:  A problem with threads and fork() was tracked down to a bug in
        solves the problem.  This causes the popen2 test to fail;
        problem and solution reported by Pablo Bleyer.
 
-       Under Linux systems using GNU libc 2 (aka libc6), the crypt
-       module now needs the -lcrypt option.  The setup.py script
-       takes care of this automatically.
-
 Red Hat Linux: Red Hat 9 built Python2.2 in UCS-4 mode and hacked
        Tcl to support it. To compile Python2.3 with Tkinter, you will
-       need to pass --enable-unicode=ucs4 flag to ./configure. 
+       need to pass --enable-unicode=ucs4 flag to ./configure.
 
        There's an executable /usr/bin/python which is Python
        1.5.2 on most older Red Hat installations; several key Red Hat tools
@@ -367,13 +361,13 @@ HP-UX:  When using threading, you may have to add -D_REENTRANT to the
        OPT variable in the top-level Makefile; reported by Pat Knight,
        this seems to make a difference (at least for HP-UX 10.20)
        even though pyconfig.h defines it. This seems unnecessary when
-       using HP/UX 11 and later - threading seems to work "out of the 
+       using HP/UX 11 and later - threading seems to work "out of the
        box".
 
-HP-UX ia64: When building on the ia64 (Itanium) platform using HP's 
-       compiler, some experience has shown that the compiler's 
-       optimiser produces a completely broken version of python 
-       (see http://www.python.org/sf/814976). To work around this, 
+HP-UX ia64: When building on the ia64 (Itanium) platform using HP's
+       compiler, some experience has shown that the compiler's
+       optimiser produces a completely broken version of python
+       (see http://www.python.org/sf/814976). To work around this,
        edit the Makefile and remove -O from the OPT line.
 
 HP PA-RISC 2.0: A recent bug report (http://www.python.org/sf/546117)
@@ -541,7 +535,7 @@ MacOSX: The tests will crash on both 10.1 and 10.2 with SEGV in
         do "sudo make install" which installs everything as superuser,
         as this may later cause problems when installing distutils-based
         additions.
-        
+
         Some people have reported problems building Python after using "fink"
         to install additional unix software. Disabling fink (remove all references
         to /sw from your .profile or .login) should solve this.
@@ -552,7 +546,7 @@ MacOSX: The tests will crash on both 10.1 and 10.2 with SEGV in
         /Library/Frameworks). A framework install is probably needed if you
         want to use any Aqua-based GUI toolkit (whether Tkinter, wxPython,
         Carbon, Cocoa or anything else).
-        
+
         See Mac/OSX/README for more information on framework builds.
 
 Cygwin: With recent (relative to the time of writing, 2001-12-19)
@@ -767,9 +761,9 @@ Building a shared libpython
 ---------------------------
 
 Starting with Python 2.3, the majority of the interpreter can be built
-into a shared library, which can then be used by the interpreter 
+into a shared library, which can then be used by the interpreter
 executable, and by applications embedding Python. To enable this feature,
-configure with --enable-shared. 
+configure with --enable-shared.
 
 If you enable this feature, the same object files will be used to create
 a static library.  In particular, the static library will contain object
@@ -1018,7 +1012,7 @@ Modules/getpath.o.
 --with-pydebug:  Enable additional debugging code to help track down
        memory management problems.  This allows printing a list of all
        live objects when the interpreter terminates.
-       
+
 --with(out)-universal-newlines: enable reading of text files with
        foreign newline convention (default: enabled). In other words,
        any of \r, \n or \r\n is acceptable as end-of-line character.
@@ -1028,6 +1022,7 @@ Modules/getpath.o.
 
 --with-tsc: Profile using the Pentium timestamping counter (TSC).
 
+
 Building for multiple architectures (using the VPATH feature)
 -------------------------------------------------------------
 
@@ -1130,9 +1125,7 @@ higher.
 For more Tkinter information, see the Tkinter Resource page:
 http://www.python.org/topics/tkinter/
 
-There are demos in the Demo/tkinter directory, in the subdirectories
-guido, matt and www (the matt and guido subdirectories have been
-overhauled to use more recent Tkinter coding conventions).
+There are demos in the Demo/tkinter directory.
 
 Note that there's a Python module called "Tkinter" (capital T) which
 lives in Lib/lib-tk/Tkinter.py, and a C module called "_tkinter"