installation of python-dev

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Diez B. Roggisch schrieb:
> I guess it is some linuxish system, as he talks about dev-packages.
> Unfortunately, quite a few distros (debian based ones and Suse to my
> knowledge) in fact remove distutils from the core and make it available as
> extra devel package. For whatever reason...

I guess the reason is that distutils requires Makefile and pyconfig.h,
which are traditionally only installed with the -dev package. Also,
the main function of distutils is similar to that of a compiler and
of the make(1); these are also traditionally considered as "development"
packages.

IOW, everything that is needed to "install from source"
is considered "development", even if the user of the tool does not
actual develop the software (but only wants to install it).
This, in turn, comes from the view that you don't normally need
to install from source (and thus don't need developer tools),
since your Linux distributions has all your software precompiled.

Regards,
Martin