[Python-Dev] python 2 for building python 3

Eli Bendersky eliben at gmail.com
Sat Dec 4 15:03:42 CET 2010


On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 15:41, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

> Le samedi 04 décembre 2010 à 13:39 +0000, Mark Dickinson a écrit :
> > On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 1:23 PM, Mark Dickinson <dickinsm at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 11:41 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>
> wrote:
> > >> Er, normally you don't need *any* Python installed to build Python (be
> > >> it 3.x or 2.x).
> > >
> > > Are you sure about this?  I remember needing an existing Python to
> > > building Python 2.7 on a new python-less install of FreeBSD a couple
> > > of months ago.  But maybe that was just an issue with timestamps on
> > > files.  I'll see if I can reproduce.
> >
> > With a fresh checkout of the release27-maint branch on an Ubuntu
> > 64-bit VM, with /usr/bin/python renamed to /usr/bin/python_not_here, a
> > './configure && make' fails with:
>
> How about with the release tarball? Perhaps SVN doesn't get timestamps
> right.
>
>
My original problem was that I was re-running 'make' on a svn py3k branch
checkout, which already had a compiled ./python exe in its root (Python 3.2,
of course). Since the script Objects/typeslots.py (which Martin checked in
just yesterday) required Python 2, this failed, although "python" on my
machine actually refers to 2.6.5. The failure then happened since in the
root of the Python build, "python" referred to the local Python 3
executable. Relying on timestamps sounds a bit too brittle.

I think it would be nice if:

1. Parts of the Makefile that use Python checked if Python is installed and
generate a useful error if not.
2. All Python scripts that are part of the build should be 2-vs-3 version
agnostic for the time being (= until Python 2 is distant history, which
won't happen soon)

Eli
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