python25 install woes

[Jon Crump]

Dear all,

[MacBook 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo; Mac OS X 10.5.4; macports 1.600]

I'm pretty new to macports, but these dependency tracking installing 
paradigms are a tremendous contribution to open-source, kudos all.

Unfortunately, macports is making me tear my hair out.

After uninstalling everything and doing selfupdate I try again:
port install python25 goes as expected and install python_select followed 
by python_select python25 seems to do its job; however:

my old leopard installed python command-line interpreter that I get in a 
terminal window used to give me a command history. Using the up and down 
arrow keys, I could step back and forward through my recent commands. Now 
with the macports installation of python25, the python cli gives me 
giberish in response to up and down arrows:

^[[A and ^[[B

If I set an env variable thus:

setenv PYTHONHOME /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/

and invoke python, I get the apple installed

Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Oct 29 2008, 10:49:16)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5488)] on darwin

which still has the old arrow behavior, so I'm confident that the problem 
is not with Terminal.

After some reading, I gathered that this might have something to do with 
readline. So I tried sudo port install py25-readline which fails with the 
following error:

Error: Target org.macports.build returned: shell command " cd 
"/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_python_py25-readline/work/Python-2.5.2/Modules" 
&& /opt/local/bin/python2.5 setup.py build " returned error 1
Command output: running build
running build_ext
building 'readline' extension
creating build
creating build/temp.macosx-10.3-i386-2.5
-DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -I/opt/local/include 
-I/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/include/python2.5 
-c readline.c -o build/temp.macosx-10.3-i386-2.5/readline.o
unable to execute -DNDEBUG: No such file or directory
error: command '-DNDEBUG' failed with exit status 1

Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

I'm not even sure if readline's got anything to do with my command history 
problem, but this doesn't look good all the same.

I can live with two python installations; I can even live with the fact 
that I'll have to port install all of the modules that I had accumulated 
in /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages; but I really don't want to do 
without my command line history.

Can anyone give me a clue as to where the problem lies, or what I've done 
wrong?

Jon