Important Notes =============== The user is strongly advised to create a file named ~/.jython, containing the following line: python.cachedir=/home/USERNAME/.jythoncachedir where USERNAME is your username. Environment variable expansion and ~ expansion are not honored in this file, so you cannot represent /home/USERNAME with ~/ or $HOME. Jython uses caching to improve performance. By default, it tries to use a global directory as its cache. This fails, because the directory is not writable by non-privileged users. Some GNU/Linux distributions solve this problem by setting python.cachedir in the launcher script, when the JVM is invoked. E.G., java -Dpython.cachedir="${HOME}/.jythoncachedir" ... That solution seems nice, because jython usually does the right thing when invoked via the launcher script. However, it has three limitations. 1. If jython is not started via the launcher, it will not cache in ~/.jythoncachedir. It will try to cache in the aforementioned global directory! 2. Specifying -Dpython.cachedir on the java command-line guarantees that the setting will be ignored if it is found in ~/.jython. Thus, the user cannot override the setting in his configuration file when the launcher is used. 3. It enforces a distribution-specific policy. The best approach is simply to let the user specify python.cachedir in ~/.jython. jythonc ======= The jythonc tool is not included by upstream in the 2.5.x series of jython. Thus, it is no longer available in this package.