Python 2.5 incompatible with Fedora Core 6 - packaging problems again

[John Nagle]

John J. Lee wrote:
> John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>skip at pobox.com wrote:
>> > The distutils setup.py script checks for ncurses bits
>>
>>    No, it just plows on after compiler errors.

> Red Hat has traditionally been painful with Python.  
...

> Also there's the traditional open source problem (this one by no means
> restricted to Python, or even to open-source OSes -- I suffered this
> on Solaris recently) of distros splitting software up and generally
> "knowing better" than the maintainer. 

    Hit that with OpenSSL.  Red Hat took elliptical curve cryptography
out of Fedora 6 for patent reasons.  With that missing, M2Crypto won't
build.  It ought to; the implementor of M2Crypto thought of that, because
it's an optional feature.  But M2Crypto uses SWIG.  SWIG doesn't normally
process nested include files.  OpenSSL had changed their configuration
approach to use nested include files.  So SWIG didn't see the #define that
said to turn off elliptical curve crypto support.  This resulted in
compile errors in the 24,000 lines of code that come out of SWIG.

    Three days of work to figure that out.

				John Nagle