2009/11/15 "Martin v. Löwis" <martin@v.loewis.de>:
http://bugs.python.org/issue4359 reminds me that Distutils reads build files like Makefile or pyconfig.h to get some environment variables through the sysconfig module at *runtime*.
This cannot work on all platforms, when our Makefile is not shipped with python but python-devel. (like Fedora)
I don't see a problem with that: you'll need the python-devel package *anyway* when running distutils, for many packages.
The problem is that the main python distribution ("python") is not working as advertised since it contains distutils, which requires "python-devel" to work. This implies that "python" has a dependency on "python-devel", which does not make sense anymore for linux distros to have two distinct packages for Python. Having some of the makefile vars stored in stdlib solve this problem. Tarek