ImportError from missing _md5 gets swallowed

[jfedor]

I encountered this problem on Mac OS X 10.4 using Python 2.5 from MacPorts and have seen it confusing other people on mailing lists.

If I install the Python package from MacPorts but forget the py25-hashlib package, importing hashlib fails, but the error message for that is not printed because ImportError is being cought in source:django/trunk/django/db/__init__.py. The user is stuck with a confusing message of "ImportError: No module named base" or similar (depending on the DB backend).

I suggest catching ImportError in source:django/trunk/django/utils/hashcompat.py and reraising it as ImproperlyConfigured.

[Jacob]

This should be considered a MacPorts bug: hashlib is part of the Python standard library, and any distribution that fails to include it is a broken distro.