Python on Minix

[Martin von Loewis]

sri at asu.edu writes:

> i just tried 'CC=cc AR=... ./configure' and i still
> get error messages such as 'here file: not found' and
> 'grep: bad regular expression' and 'regex: nexted +?-
> regular expression'. so maybe the grep and sed on
> minix2.0.0 are at fault.

'here file' refers to a (standard) shell feature of inline files;
these are constructs like

cat > conftest.$ac_ext <<EOF
...
EOF

inside configure. It looks like your shell does not properly support
these essentially features. Combined with the problems you see with
grep and sed, it seems you cannot readily run configure on Minix.

It is possible to compile Python without running configure, although
it requires a lot of manual work. Basically, you need to fill-out all
*.in files manually. These files are

config.h
Makefile
Objects/Makefile
Parser/Makefile
Python/Makefile
Modules/Makefile.pre
Modules/Setup.thread

Copy the corresponding .in file to the generated file, then replace
all things autoconf would have replaced. In config.h, #define all
features that you think Minix supports. In the Makefiles, replace all
@XXX@ constructs.

It looks like configure used to run on Minix at some time in the past;
perhaps recent autoconf versions have broken that support. So if you
can get an old copy of autoconf, perhaps you succeed in re-generating
configure from configure.in (but then, configure.in claims it needs at
least autoconf 2.0).

> the compelling reasons is that i have only minix installed on
> my laptop, and even minix makes it kinda slow!

There are, potentially, two alternatives: If you install a minimal
Linux version, or even better and old Linux version (say, with an 1.2
kernel), I'd guess it won't behave worse than Minix.

In addition, it is possible that older Python releases build on Minix
out-of-the-box. It is probably hard to find out which Python release
last worked on Minix.

Regards,
Martin