Using python RPM on SuSE 8.1 : No libpython.a or libpython.so present. Why?

[Paul Boddie]

turner at mmedia.is (Douglass Turner) wrote in message news:<ad2ca00b.0309040237.2205af33 at posting.google.com>...
> Hello,
> 
> I'm trying to install a statistics package called RSPython that
> requires a python shared library to be present on my SuSE 8.1 linux
> box. My python is provide as an RPM package and as far as I can tell
> there is no libpython.a or libpython.so. What gives?

What does "locate libpython" give you? I'd expect those libraries to
be under /usr/lib on most modern (GNU/)Linux distributions, but
possibly not with exactly those names. The presence of a shared
library is a comparatively recent luxury, and I wouldn't expect that
to be there for releases of Python earlier than 2.3.

> How do I get these libraries on my machine?

The chances are that they do exist, but with more specific names, as
the following path illustrates:

/usr/lib/python2.2/config/libpython2.2.a

Paul