[Python-Dev] configure and setup.py (original) (raw)

Sjoerd Mullender sjoerd at acm.org
Tue Sep 2 15:31:17 EDT 2003

I am trying to build Python on a Unix system (Irix in this case, but that's irrelevant) and I am getting a bit frustrated.

The problem is this. I tell configure where to find libraries and include files using options such as CPPFLAGS='-I...' and LDFLAGS='-L...' (you can provide those on the configure command line).

Making Python then goes relatively smoothly. However, building the dynamically loadable modules with setup.py does not work smoothly. The main problem is that setup.py does not use all relevant information from the Makefile. I just submitted a bug report (with patch) for distutils so that it'll use the LDFLAGS variable from the Makefile, but that's not enough.

Setup.py checks whether it can find certain libraries (readline comes to mind, that's the one that triggered my investigation). There are a number of extra system-dependent directories hard-coded in setup.py, but it totally ignores the directories that were specified at configure time. I think this is not the right way of doing things.

If any knowledge about where compilers look for libraries should be built in anywhere, it's in distutils, not setup.py. Also, and more importantly, distutils should figure out the extra library directories that were specified at configure time and add the information to the list of searchable directories (CCompiler.library_dirs). If this were done, setup.py would find my -lreadline and the readline module would get compiled and I would be able to edit in my interactive Python.

The same goes for include files.

-- Sjoerd Mullender <sjoerd at acm.org>

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