The Pylons web framework is aimed at making webapps and large programmatic website development in Python easy. Pylons combines the very best ideas from the worlds of Ruby, Python and Perl, providing a structured but extremely flexible Python web framework. BlastOff is a Pylons application template providing a working site skeleton configured with SQLAlchemy, mako, repoze.who, ToscaWidgets, TurboMail, and WebFlash.

You’ve added a whole directory to get checked into subversion, and then realized you forgot to remove the binaries, or perhaps you had some hidden files, .nfs0001 or thumbs.db or something else you just don’t want to commit. There’s two ways to undo this situation.

Rpmbuild’s RPATH feature is used to search libraries outside of standard paths. They are given to the linker at buildtime. If the developers of the code you’re trying to turn into an RPM did not take any of these considerations into account when they write their programs then you may be forced to skip check-rpath.

I like os’s subprocess.Popen() to run shell commands from within my Python code. I also like to define TRUE and FALSE to use as return values. Now I know what you’re thinking: there’s no such thing as ‘C’s #define in python because there’s no compiler to swap out of all your substitutions at compile time. However, it’s just as easy to achieve the same results.

Here’s how to use svn propset with single or multiple dependencies along with the pre-revprop-change hook setup. It was a pain in the butt at first because it just didn’t make sense, but now I get it.

In GNU’s Make manual, there’s a description of how to use one Makefile to call targets of another Makefile. You have to use $(MAKE) in order for it to work properly. I’ve found one little snag that’s not mentioned. If my target name is the same as the directory name where the other Makefile is, it will never work. It always says it’s up to date! If I change the target name, it works fine.

You have a bunch of related applications, each has their own Makefile that knows only about their own application, but you have dependencies where one app needs to be built before another. Here’s a skeleton bash script for building any one thing or everything.

#!/bin/bash

function build {
echo "*** …

It’s all about the design of the language and I agree with the author completely when he says, “Most languages have so much friction and awkwardness built into their design.”

I like it. It’s so simple and flexible. Define it with none, then assign sys.argv in place of argv.

Eclipse - The executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library. This problem is so generic, there’s a ton of things that could be wrong. It also depends on which OS you’re using!