Embedding, "import site", PYTHONHOME, and an old, old issue

[Jim Hill]

Well, I've found about a hundred thousand web pages where people have
had the same problem I have but nary a page with a solution that works
for me.

I want to do a simple embed, so I've followed the example in the
Extending and Embedding documentation:

In the .c file, 

#include <Python.h>

int routine() {
  Py_Initialize();
  PyRun_SimpleString("from time import time,ctime\n"
                     "print 'Today is',ctime(time())\n");
  Py_Finalize();
  return 0;
  }

The code compiles just fine, but when I execute it the call to
Py_Initialize() comes back with:

'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named time



I found a lot of websites that say to set PYTHONHOME to the the path to
the directory where site.py lives.  I did that but I get the same error.

Here are a few bits o' additional information:

'python -v' tells me it was built with gcc 3.4.4 (and has no trouble at
all finding site.py whether PYTHONHOME is defined or not).  The
following code snippet:

  >>> import distutils.sysconfig
  >>> distutils.sysconfig.get_config_var('LINKFORSHARED')

comes back with '-Xlinker -export-dynamic'.

My own code needs to use Portland Group's pgi.  I did some googling for
various permutations of nouns from the preceding few paragraphs and
found Pythonic mention of using "-Wl,-export-dynamic" as a flag for the
PG linker.  OK, try that, builds fine, same error.

I cannot recompile Python on this machine and I don't really understand
exactly what is happening with the Py_* function calls in the C snippet
above, or whether I can get more detailed traceback info.  This is the
first time I've tried embedding and it's rather obvious that I've run
into a problem that everyone but Messrs. van Rossum and Lundh has hit.
Somebody, somewhere must have an honest-to-glub solution.  If you are
that somebody, please let me know what to do because I'm about to throw
in the towel and embed That Other Language.

Oh, one more thing: if I launch python from the shell and type in the
strings from the C snippet it works fine.

Thanks,


Jim
-- 

                 It's not "pretexting", it's "lying."