Python 2.5 zlib trouble

I am trying to deploy an app on google app engine 开发者_JAVA百科using bottle, a micro-framework, similar to flask. I am running on ubuntu which comes with python 2.7 installed but GAE needs version 2.5, so I installed 2.5. I then realized I didn't use make altinstall so I may have a default version problem now. But my real problem is that when I try to use the gae server to test locally I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last): 
  File "/opt/google/appengine/dev_appserver.py", line 77, in <module> 
    run_file(__file__, globals()) 
  File "/opt/google/appengine/dev_appserver.py", line 73, in run_file 
    execfile(script_path, globals_) 
  File "/opt/google/appengine/google/appengine/tools/ 
dev_appserver_main.py", line 156, in <module> 
    from google.appengine.tools import dev_appserver 
  File "/opt/google/appengine/google/appengine/tools/ 
dev_appserver.py", line 94, in <module> 
    import zlib 

ImportError: No module named zlib

Can you help me with this?

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How did you build Python 2.5? If you built it from sources yourself, there's a good possibility the zlib module didn't get built because the necessary libraries and header files weren't installed on your system.

On Ubuntu, you need (I think) the zlib1g-dev package.

This will be true for a variety of other modules as well (for example, without the appropriate OpenSSL development libraries/headers in place, you won't get the ssl module either).

Someone may also have a python2.5 package for your version of Ubuntu (although neither Natty or Maverick appear to have one in the official repositories).

---

Before figuring out that using a post-2.5 Python worked just fine as long as you didn't use any post-2.5 language features or packages (or additions to package), I wrote up a walkthrough for building 2.5 for Ubuntu here. It includes the bit you need for zlib.

I'm now happily developing on Ubuntu using Python 2.6.5 (with SDK 1.5.4).