[issue13472] devguide doesn’t list all build dependencies

[Éric Araujo]

Éric Araujo <merwok at netwok.org> added the comment:

> I have a few arguments in favor of my position:
Hm, I said that people wanted a “feature-full library” but I was confused: We’re talking about a Python built for contributing, not to develop your app, so my argument does not apply.  So, the devguide should list the optional build deps *and* say something like “these are not needed to run Python and its test suite, but you may need one them of for some patches”.

> (I've found and fixed several issues related to zlib because it was missing here)
I know :)  I have a Python built without threads and run packaging and distutils tests with it from time to time, but it seems I can’t disable zlib at configure time.

>> the addition of this message and further edits to its wording were done
>> exactly to avoid people worrying that their python binary is not usable.
> But it's still missing an "optional" before modules imho.
What I meant is that the history of this messages says that you can just go ahead and add “optional”.

> The second message that says to "look in setup.py in detect_modules()" doesn't seem too
> useful too (but maybe I should take a look ;).
It is scary code.

>> Okay; do we need to collect info for all major OSes
> You can also do it incrementally
Okay, I’ll make a patch.

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue13472>
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