User guide

Chapter 3. Libraries and Runtime Support

KNewStuff2

KNewStuff2 is a collaborative data sharing library used by many KDE4 applications. For more

information, refer to http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KNS2.

3.3.5.2. kdelibs Documentation

The kdelibs-apidocs package provides HTML documentation for the KDE development framework

in /usr/share/doc/HTML/en/kdelibs4-apidocs/. The following links also provide details on

KDE-related programming tasks:

• http://techbase.kde.org/

• http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials

• http://techbase.kde.org/Development/FAQs

• http://api.kde.org

3.3.6. Python

The python package adds support for the Python programming language. This package provides the

object and cached bytecode files needed to enable runtime support for basic Python programs. It also

contains the python interpreter and the pydoc documentation tool. The python-devel package

contains the libraries and header files needed for developing Python extensions.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux also ships with numerous python-related packages. By convention, the

names of these packages have a python prefix or suffix. Such packages are either library extensions

or python bindings to an existing library. For instance, dbus-python is a Python language binding for

D-Bus.

Note that both cached bytecode (*.pyc/*.pyo files) and compiled extension modules (*.so files) are

incompatible between Python 2.4 (used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5) and Python 2.6 (used in Red

Hat Enterprise Linux 6). As such, you will need to rebuild any extension modules you use that are not

part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

3.3.6.1. Python Updates

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 version of Python features various language changes. For information

about these changes, refer to the following project resources:

• What's New in Python 2.5: http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.5.html

• What's New in Python 2.6: http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html

Both resources also contain advice on porting code developed using previous Python versions.

3.3.6.2. Python Documentation

For more information about Python, refer to man python. You can also install python-docs, which

provides HTML manuals and references in the following location:

file:///usr/share/doc/python-docs-version/html/index.html

For details on library and language components, use pydoc component_name. For example, pydoc

math will display the following information about the math Python module: