You'll need Python, of course; version 1.5.2 works with some fixes, and it also works with Python 2.0, which is what I primarily use.
The code is packaged using Distutils, the new distribution tools for
Python introduced in Python 2.0. If you're using 1.5.2, first you'll
have to get the latest Distutils release from the Distutils SIG page
at http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/download.html and
install it. This is simply a matter of untarring or unzipping the
release package, and then running python setup.py install
.
If you're using 1.5.2 and have installed previous versions of the
Distutils, be sure to get the very latest version, since developing
the ZODB distribution turned up some bugs along the way. If you
encounter problems compiling ZODB/TimeStamp.c or your compiler reports
an error like ``Can't create build/temp.linux2/ExtensionClass.o: No
such file or directory'', you need an updated version. Old versions of
Distutils have two bugs which affect the setup scripts. First, for a
long time the define_macros
keyword in setup.py files didn't work due
to a Distutils bug, so I hacked TimeStamp.c in earlier releases. The
Distutils have since been fixed, and the hack became unnecessary, so I
removed it. Second, the code that creates directories tries to be
smart and caches them to save time by not trying to create a directory
twice, but this code was broken in old versions.
You'll need a C compiler to build the packages, because there are various C extension modules. At the moment no one is making Windows binaries available, so you'll need a Windows development environment to use the