Re: [pygame] pygame-ctypes installation [was: Sound to Light]

[Alex Holkner <aholkner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Luke Paireepinart wrote:

> Alex - I'm having trouble with your pygame-ctypes.
> First off - it installs into lib/site-packages/pygame?  doesn't this 
> mean it conflicts with regular pygame?

Yes it does -- I wouldn't recommend installing it (as there's nothing to 
compile, it will run from it's own directory.. just add it to PYTHONPATH).

> (I don't have regular pygame installed right now)

That's lucky :-)  Just delete the lib/site-packages/pygame and 
lib/site-packages/SDL directories before you install the "real" pygame.

> Second - I installed pygame-ctypes using 'pygame setup.py install'
> The original 'pygame-ctypes-0.07' directory is on my desktop, and it 
> copied files into
> 'C:/python24/Lib/site-packages/pygame' and 
> 'C:/python24/Lib/site-packages/SDL'
Seems reasonable, though I'm not sure exactly how windows lays out files.

> Whenever I ran the example programs in 
> 'desktop/pygame-ctypes-0.07/test' I saw this error message pop up and 
> disappear, so I
> went into a cmd prompt and ran it so I could see the error message, 
> and it was
> File "C:\Documents and 
> Settings\Rabidpoobear\Desktop\pygame-ctypes-0.07\test\checkkeys.py", 
> line 14, in ?
>    from SDL import *
> File "C:\python24\Lib\site-packages\SDL\__init__.py", line 30, in ?
>    import SDL.dll
> File "C:\python24\Lib\site-packages\SDL\dll.py", line 217, in ?
>    _dll = SDL_DLL('SDL','SDL_Linked_Version')
> File "C:\python24\Lib\site-packages\SDL\dll.py", line 42, in __init__
>    self._dll = getattr(cdll, find_library(library_name))
> TypeError: getattr(): attribute name must be string
>
> Now that I think about it more, I'm guessing that 
> find_library(library_name) is returning None instead
> of the library location because I don't have SDL installed.

Yep!  Also I doubt it will work on Windows at the moment.  Look for a 
newer release over this weekend that fixes this problem.

> So what I'm wondering is, if I just install SDL and SDL_image, mixer, 
> ttf, and sound, using the
> windows installers, is it going to add it to the path for me so 
> pygame-ctypes will find it?

So long as all these .dll's end up somewhere normal like 
c:\windows\system32, they'll be found just fine.


> Also, I know it should be self-explanatory for a programmer such as 
> myself that a
> ctypes module that wraps a C dll would need the C dll to be present 
> somewhere,
> but obviously I was confused long enough to start writing an e-mail to 
> you.
> Perhaps it's because I just woke up ;)
> Anyway, maybe you should put a 'Don't forget to install SDL and 
> ctypes!' on the
> front page.

That's an excellent idea, thanks.  The other critical dependency is of 
course ctypes, which *must* be 1.0.0.

I'll have something a little more Windows friendly for you later today.

Alex.