[Distutils] reservations about pythonv

[Leonardo Rochael Almeida]

Hi Carl,

On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 04:06, Carl Meyer <carl at oddbird.net> wrote:
> Hi Leonardo,
>
> On 03/19/2011 08:18 PM, Leonardo Rochael Almeida wrote:
>> Another variant of this case, one we're actually facing here at our
>> company (Nexedi) right now, is when you need to compile extension
>> modules with libraries that are newer than the ones in the system, and
>> you don't have root access. The absense of LD_LIBRARY_PATH means a
>> segfault on an arbitrary moment during execution, not just an
>> unloadable library.
>
> [...]
>
> Actually, the comparison to installing a custom-compiled Python to a
> non-standard location increases my sense that pythonv should not
> automatically add to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. If you "make install" Python to a
> non-standard location (on my Ubuntu system I have various versions of
> Python that I've compiled and installed in /opt), it doesn't take it
> upon itself to modify your system's library path accordingly, does it?
> So why should pythonv do any differently?

It's likely that pythonv shoudn't do anything differently, at least
from the POV of the Python binary. I just wanted to mention a use-case
for needing LD_LIBRARY_PATH set while running Python.

This being distutils-sig, though, maybe we could talk about whether
supporting scripts or generated scripts could do something about it.
For example, the 'activate' script, or, in buildout, pip, etc. case,
shebang lines that included an 'env' with the correct LD_LIBRARY_PATH,
like:

#!/usr/bin/env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/my/custom/lib /my/custom/bin/python

Cheers,

Leo