Compiling Python on multiple platforms...

Donn Cave donn at u.washington.edu
Fri Oct 27 15:08:32 EDT 2000


Quoth Bjorn Pettersen <bjorn at roguewave.com>:
| I'm about to start compiling Python on a number of *nix systems
| (Solaris,HPUX,AIX,True64,IRIX,Linux). To make matters more interesting
| I'm only making these to the point where our sysadmin can say "make
| install" (they're so sensitive about the root password ;-)
|
| Question 1: We'll be doing some xml work. Do I need to download and
| compile expat seperatly, or does it come with the Python 2.0 tarball?
|
| Question 2: Are there any of the above platforms where readline doesn't
| work?
|
| Question 3: Are there any of the above platforms where Tkinter doesn't
| work? (is this a separate install?)
|
| Question 4: Are there any of the above platforms where PIL doesn't work?
|
| Question 5: I'm hoping to have _one_ source installation, and compile
| the binaries so they're not conflicting with each other... Is this
| possible?

Unless I missed something, expat is separate;  don't know for 2-4.

I generally do build with a single source and multiple, separate build
trees for different platforms.  It's pretty easy to set up at configure
time, just make an empty directory and run $src/configure --srcdir $src.

The only flaw here with the Python 2.0 distribution is that the grammar
source is generated during the build, and then copied to the source tree.
I don't expect this will cause you any real trouble.  Historically, it
could also make a Lib/plat-xxx directory in the source tree, if the
distribution doesn't include the right one for the platform, haven't
seen this with 2.0 but it still does for all I know.

You will get a wretched "make" implementation on AIX, and it may not
handle VPATH well enough to cope with this.  If you can use GNU make
there, do.  True64 and GNU Linux make will do OK, and HP/UX's I think.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu



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