MultiVersionInstalls

Multi-Version Installs

Starting with 2.5.3.0 the wx and wxPython pacakge directories will be installed in a subdirectory of the site-packages directory, instead of directly in site-pacakges. This is done to help facilitate having multiple versions of wxPython installed side-by-side. Why would you want to do this? One possible scenario is you have an app that requires wxPython 2.4 but you want to use the newest 2.5 to do your development with. Or perhaps you want to be able to test your app with several different versions of wxPython to ensure compatibility. Before everyone panics, rest asured that if you only install one version of wxPython then you should notice no difference in how things work.

In addition to installing wxPython into a "versioned" subdirectory of site-packages, a file named wx.pth is optionally installed that will contain the name of the versioned subdirectory. This will cause that subdirectory to be automatically added to the sys.path and so doing an "import wx" will find the package in the subdirectory like like it would have if it was still located in site-packages. I say "optionally" above because that is how you can control which install of wxPython is the default one. Which ever version installs the wx.pth file will be the one that is imported with a plain "import wx" statement. Of course you can always manipulate that by editing the wx.pth file, or by setting PYTHONPATH in the environment, or by the method described in the next paragraph.

Finally, a new module named wxversion.py is installed to the site-pacakges directory. It can be used to manipulate the sys.path at runtime so your applications can select which version of wxPython they would like to to have imported. You use it like this:

      import wxversion
      wxversion.require("2.4")
      import wx

Then eventhough a 2.5 version of wxPython is the default the application that does the above the first time that wx is imported will actually get a 2.4 version. NOTE: There isn't actually a 2.4 version of wxPython that supports this, but there will be.