[Distutils] _spawn_posix fails, command line works??

John J. Lee jjl@pobox.com
Wed Jan 23 17:28:00 2002


This is so bizarre I think it has to be something I'm doing wrong, but
here goes:

Having some trouble linking something on Windows, I tried moving back to
linux to see if I could get it working in distutils there first. The
actual compilation was working fine on Windows (mingw32).  So, back on
linux:

$ ./setup.py build
[...usual stuff...]
gcc -g -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -DHAVE_CONFIG_H=1 -DLOCALEDIR=\"\" -DGNULOCALEDIR=\"\" -DLOCALE_ALIAS_PATH=\"\" -Iwin -Iwin/src -Iwin/lib -Iwin/intl -I/usr/lib/glib/include -c win/src/argmatch.c -o build/temp.linux-i586-2.1/argmatch.o
win/src/argmatch.c:0: unterminated string or character constant
win/src/argmatch.c:0: possible real start of unterminated constant
win/src/argmatch.c:0: unterminated string or character constant
win/src/argmatch.c:0: possible real start of unterminated constant
win/src/argmatch.c:0: unterminated string or character constant
win/src/argmatch.c:0: possible real start of unterminated constant
error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

This file is the first one it attempted to compile.

OK, I thought, clearly I've messed up the line endings or something.
However, to cut the longer story short, if you cut and paste the command
distutils claims to be executing (in distutils.spawn._spawn_posix, I
guess) onto the command line, it works fine!

Looking at argmatch.c, of course, reveals nothing amiss.  Line 0 is
the first line of a multi-line comment.

Still, I can't really bring myself to believe that there is something
wrong with _spawn_posix; at least, not enough to try to 'debug' it.

Is this problem my fault, or distutils'?

Just to make clear: I'm not doing any poking around in distutils'
internals in my setup.py: it's just a perfectly standard set of
Extension() instances, and a couple of static libs, and the only distutils
function I call is setup itself.


John