Installing lxml
===============

Requirements
------------

You need libxml2 and libxslt, in particular:

* libxml 2.6.16 (newer versions should work). It can be found here:
  http://xmlsoft.org/downloads.html

* libxslt 1.1.12 (newer versions should work). It can be found here:
  http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/downloads.html

You also need Pyrex (0.9.3) to compile the software. It can be found
here:

* http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python/Pyrex/

You also need Python 2.3 (Python 2.4 also ought to work).

Installation
------------

Type::

  python setup.py install

to compile and install the library.

It's also possible to do this::

  python2.3 setup.py  build_ext -i

or just::

  make

This will not install lxml, but if you place lxml's "src" on your
PYTHONPATH somehow, you can import it and play with it.

Building lxml with gcc 4.0
--------------------------

Pyrex 0.9.3 generates C code that gcc 4.0 does not accept. Pending an
official release of a version of Pyrex that does work with gcc 4.0,
here's a patch to Pyrex that makes lxml compile and appear to work
with gcc 4.0:

http://codespeak.net/lxml/Pyrex-0.9.3-gcc4.patch

Some Linux distributions such as Fedora Core 4 and Ubuntu Linux may
already have most of this applied. In that case, this smaller patch
may be applicable to make lxml compile properly:

http://codespeak.net/lxml/Pyrex-0.9.3-gcc4-small.patch

It may however actually be that at the time you read this, this extra
patch has been applied by the distributions as well.

Troubleshooting
---------------

lxml's setup.py tries to be smart and uses libxml2's xml2-config to
find the installation path of libxml2. If this cannot be found or
doesn't work for some reason or another, try editing the setup.py,
by changing this::

  # if you want to configure include dir manually, you can do so here,
  # for instance:
  # include_dirs = ['/usr/include/libxml2']
  include_dirs = guess_include_dirs()

Into something like this::
  
  include_dirs = ['/usr/include/libxml2']

If that still doesn't work, try registering the extension in a
different way entirely; there's a commented block of code at the
bottom of setup.py with an example.

If you still have trouble, contact us on the `mailing list`_.

.. _`mailing list`: http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/lxml-dev

Running the tests
-----------------

You can run the main tests by using::

  python test.py

Alternatively, you can use::

  make test

To run the ElementTree and cElementTree compatibility tests, make sure
you have lxml on your PYTHONPATH first, then run::

  python2.3 selftest.py

and::

  python2.3 selftest2.py

If the tests give failures, errors, or worse, segmentation faults,
we'd really like to know. Please contact us on the `mailing list`_,
and please specify the version of libxml2, libxslt and Python you were
using.

.. _`mailing list`: http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/lxml-dev