Relocatable binary installs....

[friedmud at gmail.com]

Hello all,

I'm currently working on a software package that is going to be
distributed in binary form (with accompanying source) for lot of
different unixes (Linux, AIX, HP-UX and others).  Parts of the package
are written in Python... so we are going to want to distribute our own
version of python.

Right now we are just distributing the Python tarball and building it
at install time.  This works ok, but we are running into some problems
on some machines with weird default installs (DEC Alphas in
particular).... some of them won't build all the python modules we want
(although our in house machines will).

What I want to do is compile python statically into binaries and then
plop them wherever our customers choose to do an install (we will
provide the source tarballs on a cd as well).  The problem we are
running into is that when we do this python continues to think it's
still installed where it was initially compiled and not where it has
been placed (which causes some problems with traceback and some other
functions).

Is there a way to make a relocateable python binary... that is... a
python installation that won't care where it is on the machine... and
won't care if it gets put somewhere else besides /  ?

Sorry for the long winded post... just want to make sure you understand
my problem.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Derek