Blog moved

Maintaining my own wordpress instance was getting tiresome so I've switched to blogger. Article information should still work just fine but comments are missing. My apologies!

Building Python2.5 for Ubuntu 11.04

I run a few appengine instances and so I was quite disappointed after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 to find no pre-packaged versions of python2.5 (the version on which appengine is currently based). Python 2.7 is not compatible with various parts of the appengine dev server. After a bit of playing around this is the easiest way I found to get everything working that I needed. YMMV.

edit the top of dev_appengine.py and replace

#!/usr/bin/env python

with

#!/usr/bin/env python2.6

Python 2.6 is not ideal but it seems to do the job. If you want to go the extra mile (as I did) and install Python 2.5.5, you need to manually add ssl and address some bad assumptions python makes about sqlite3's library locations...