[Python-Dev] Please give this patch for building bsddb a try

[Martin v. Loewis]

barry@zope.com (Barry A. Warsaw) writes:

> Basically what you have in cvs works great, except for one small
> necessary addition.  If you build Berkeley DB from source, it's going
> to install it in something like /usr/local/BerkeleyDB.3.3 by default.
> Why they choose such a bizarre location, I don't know.
> 
> The problem is that unless your sysadmin hacks ld.so.conf to add
> /usr/local/BerkeleyDB.X.Y/lib onto your standard ld run path,
> bsddbmodule.so won't be linked in such a way that it can actually
> resolve the symbols at run time.  I don't think it's reasonable to
> require such system hacking to get the bsddb module to link properly,
> and I think we can do better.
> 
> Here's a small patch to setup.py which should fix things in a portable
> way, at least for *nix systems.  It sets the envar LD_RUN_PATH to the
> location that it found the Berkeley library, but only if that envar
> isn't already set.  

I dislike that change. Setting LD_RUN_PATH is the jobs of whoever is
building the compiler, and should not be done by Python
automatically. So far, the Python build process avoids adding any -R
linker options, since it requires quite some insight into the specific
installation to determine whether usage of that option is the right
thing.

If setup.py fails to build an extension correctly, it is the
adminstrator's job to specify a correct build procedure in
Modules/Setup. For that reason, I rather recommend to remove the magic
that setup.py looks in /usr/local/Berkeley*, instead of adding more
magic.

Regards,
Martin