[Numpy-discussion] Trouble installing numarray on Solaris

[Todd Miller]

On Sat, 2005-07-02 at 20:30 -0700, Russell E Owen wrote:
> At 6:43 AM -0400 7/2/05, Todd Miller wrote:
> >On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 15:02 -0700, Russell E. Owen wrote:
> >>  A user of my application reports that installing numarray 1.3.2 on
> >>  Solaris using Python 2.3.1 has run into trouble:
> >>
> >>    prompt> python
> >>    Python 2.3.1 (#1, Sep 30 2003, 20:29:58) [C] on sunos5
> >>    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> >>    >>> import numarray
> >>    Fatal Python error: Call to API function without first calling
> >>    import_libnumarray() in Src/_convmodule.c
> >>    Abort (core dumped)
> >
> >It looks vaguely like an binary API mismatch of some kind... or one of
> >you numarray modules is stale or broken.  To restate the obvious,   it's
> >likely that numarray won't import (in C!) because import_libnumarray()
> >is very defintely in _convmodule.c.  Since it's there and the API
> >pointer was not initialized,  the libnumarray import failed.
> 
> Here's what the person had to say about it. I found the solution 
> rather puzzling, but perhaps it makes sense to somebody who 
> understands more about such things:
> 
> Got it working; it was indeed that the shared object modules weren't 
> being linked correctly at build time, so when python tried to load 
> them, they were missing symbols (eg, that are defined in the C math 
> library, for example).  Probably the result of compiling numarray 
> w/Solaris's cc rather than gcc.  I manually linked the modules for 
> now, and numarry can now be imported... It even passed all its tests.

One thing I should have mentioned earlier is that numarray has been
built at STScI using Solaris's cc from the beginning.  Although our
primary development platform is now x86 Linux, we still ultimately
deploy to Solaris so I think Solaris cc per-say is probably not the
problem here.  

Here are the tools I use personally w/o problems:

basil> uname -a
SunOS anysun.stsci.edu 5.8 Generic_117350-18 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
basil> cc -V
cc: Sun WorkShop 6 2000/06/19 C 5.1 Patch 109491-02

Regards,
Todd