At 10:39 AM 9/13/2008 -0700, rupert.thurner wrote:

phillip eby suggested that "python-dev" is not installed and this should be the cause. blastwave does not really offer such a thing, so i tried to check the files, and took debian solaris as example: http://packages.debian.org/sid/sparc/python2.5-dev/filelist

the header files are there, as well as the .so file /opt/csw/lib/ libpython2.5.so. but

/opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/Setup /opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/Setup.config /opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/Setup.local /opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/config.c /opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/config.c.in /opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/install-sh /opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/libpython2.5-pic.a /opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/libpython2.5.a /opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/libpython2.5.so /opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/makesetup /opt/csw/lib/python2.5/config/python.o

is missing. could it be that setuptools would miss this?

It's not setuptools that cares; it's the distutils. Or more likely, the linker. IIUC, these files are not optional. This appears to suggest that there's a bug in the Python configuration on the platform: http://blogs.sun.com/dp/entry/a_screencasting_toolchain You might want to follow up with the person who reported(?) the bug back to Sun or whoever it is. This is not a setuptools problem nor a distutils problem: the missing files are clearly symptomatic of breakage in your platform's Python installation. You might want to consider building your own Python from source, as often these kinds of breakage are caused by platform distributors "cleaning things up" that shouldn't be moved or deleted. (For example, separating the headers and libraries into a separate "lib", "dev", or "devel" package.) If that's what happened here, then building a fresh Python from source (without the platform vendor's "improvements") would fix it.