  What's IMDbPY?
  ==============

IMDbPY is a Python package useful to retrieve and manage the data of
the IMDb movie database.

This is still a beta version with very few functionalities; hopefully
future releases will be much more complete!

IMDbPY is mainly a tool intended for programmers and developers, but
some example scripts are included.

If you're a poor, simple, clueless user, read the "README.users" file. :-)

If you want to develop a program/script/package/framework using the
IMDbPY package, see the "README.package" file, for instructions about
how to use this package.

If you're crazy enough and/or you've realized that your higher
inspiration in life is to help the development of IMDbPY, begin reading
the "README.devel" file. ;-)


  INSTALLATION
  ============

Everything you need to do is to run, as the root user, the command:
    # python setup.py install

If, for some reason, it doesn't work, you can copy the "./imdb"
directory in the local site-packages directory of the python
major version you're using.
To know what major version of python you've installed, run:
    $ python -V

It should return a string like "Python 2.2.1"; in this example
the major version is "2.2".
Now copy the "./imdb" directory:
    # cp -r ./imdb /usr/local/lib/python{MAJORVERSION}/site-packages/


  FEATURES
  ========

So far you can search for a movie with a given title, and retrieve
informations for a given movie; the only supported data access
system is 'http' (i.e.: the data are fetched through the IMDb's web
server http://akas.imdb.com); in the future I hope to support other
data sources, like a local installation of the IMDb database (see
http://www.imdb.com/interfaces.html), the e-mail interface and so on.


  FEATURE OF THE HTTP DATA ACCESS SYSTEM
  ======================================

* Returns almost every information that can be found on a "combined
  details" page for the given title (e.g.:
  http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/combined for "The Matrix")
  and from the "plot summary" page.
* The use of the "akas" server will provide access to a lot of
  AKA titles in many languages, so it's really useful if English is
  not your native language.
* You can set/use a proxy to access the web; if set, the HTTP_PROXY
  environment variable will be used, otherwise you can set a
  proxy with the set_proxy() method of the IMDb class (obviously
  this method is available only for the http data access system,
  since it's defined in the IMDbHTTPMixIn class of the parser.http
  package.
  Example:
      from imdb import IMDb
      i = IMDb(kind='http') # the kind argument is not really needed,
                            # since "http" is the default.
      i.set_proxy('http://localhost:8080/')

  You can force a direct connection to the net setting the proxy
  to a null value (i.e.: i.set_proxy('')).


