One of the features of Python that makes it so powerful is the ability to take existing libraries, written in C or C++, and make them available as Python extension modules. Such extension modules are often called bindings for the library. SIP is a tool that makes it very easy to create Python bindings for C and C++ libraries. It was originally developed to create PyQt, the Python bindings for the Qt toolkit, but can be used to create bindings for any C or C++ library. NOTE: This package will, by default, overwrite some files contained in the stock kdebindings package included in Slackware. The version of sip included with kdebindings is an older version which works fine for generating qt3/kde3 python bindings, but the newer versions are needed to generate qt4 python bindings (pyqt4 on SlackBuilds.org). To the best of our knowledge, sip is backwards compatible, so there shouldn't be any adverse effects from the overwritten files, but we cannot make any promises. If you do encounter problems, remove this sip package and reinstall the stock kdebinding package, and then notify the maintainer of this build script (see the sip.info file). As an alternative, this build script provides a PREFIX variable that can be set to select a different installation prefix (such as /opt). Doing so will require you to add the directory in which the sip binary is located to your PATH, add the sip includes directory to your compiler includes search path, and add the sip python module path to your PYTHONPATH environment variable. All of these things will have to be done manually and in such a way that they take priority over the files installed in /usr prefix.