Re: pysqlite-2.5.5-win32-py2.6.exe – it wouldn’t install on my clean virtual XP environment. It was unable to locate the component msvcr71.dll. So I was forced to include that in the Windows package.
The mysqldb module doesn’t currently have an official 2.6 version of the Windows installer. Which was the main reason I had kept the Windows version to Python 2.5 for which there was one (SciPy was no longer relevant so shifting to 2.6 for all installers was definitely in contention). And there had been mixed experience of mysqldb packages put together by third parties (https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=2316047&forum_id=70460). But I really needed a feature which was introduced in Python 2.6 – namely the float method as_integer_ratio. This was needed to enable my float to decimal function to work (http://docs.python.org/library/decimal.html) which I needed to get the level of precision required to pass the hardest NIST ANOVA test (http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/strd/anova/SmLs09.html). In the end I went with http://www.thescotties.com/mysql-python/test/MySQL-python-1.2.3c1.win32-py2.6.exe. Another option was http://www.codegood.com/archives/4.
BTW there is a lot to like about Python 2.6 – it is the gateway to the 3 series and will make that eventual transition a lot easier.
[…] but not exactly trivial. Sometimes a single file can create a lot of issues e.g. msvcr71.dll (See http://www.sofastatistics.com/blog/?p=113). To ensure this file is available on the target computer it is not simply a matter of transferring […]