identifying modules to be built and not

[skip at pobox.com]

The thread John Nagle started about building Python 2.5 on Fedora Core 6 led
me to implement a slight change to Python's setup.py.  You clearly can't
have the build stop if the bits needed to build a particular module aren't
found or if compiling a module fails, but it's fairly straightforward to
note which modules could be built and which can't be.  There's a patch for
setup.py on SourceForge you can try if you want:

    http://python.org/sf/1673619

When setup.py is run it emits output like this after checking for modules it
knows how to build (this is from my Mac):

    Located the necessary bits to build these modules:
    _AE               _AH               _App           
    _bisect           _bsddb            _CarbonEvt     
    _CF               _CG               _Cm            
    _codecs_cn        _codecs_hk        _codecs_iso2022
    _codecs_jp        _codecs_kr        _codecs_tw     
    _collections      _csv              _Ctl           
    _ctypes           _ctypes_test      _curses        
    _curses_panel     _Dlg              _Drag          
    _elementtree      _Evt              _File          
    _Fm               _Folder           _functools     
    _hashlib          _heapq            _Help          
    _hotshot          _IBCarbon         _Icn           
    _Launch           _List             _locale        
    _lsprof           _Menu             _Mlte          
    _multibytecodec   _OSA              _Qd            
    _Qdoffs           _Qt               _random        
    _Res              _Scrap            _Snd           
    _socket           _sqlite3          _ssl           
    _struct           _TE               _testcapi      
    _tkinter          _weakref          _Win           
    array             audioop           autoGIL        
    binascii          bsddb185          bz2            
    cmath             ColorPicker       cPickle        
    crypt             cStringIO         datetime       
    dbm               dl                fcntl          
    gestalt           grp               icglue         
    imageop           itertools         MacOS          
    math              mmap              Nav            
    nis               operator          OSATerminology 
    parser            pwd               pyexpat        
    readline          resource          rgbimg         
    select            strop             syslog         
    termios           time              unicodedata    

    Failed to find the necessary bits to build these modules:
    _elementtree      _md5              _sha           
    _sha256           _sha512           gdbm           
    linuxaudiodev     ossaudiodev       spwd           

Feel free to add comments to the above patch page.  It will help the
development team decide whether or not it's a worthwhile addition.

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