python 6 compilation failure on RHEL

[Peter Otten]

John Nagle wrote:

> On 8/20/2012 2:50 PM, Emile van Sebille wrote:
>> On 8/20/2012 1:55 PM Walter Hurry said...
>>> On Mon, 20 Aug 2012 12:19:23 -0700, Emile van Sebille wrote:
>>>
>>>> Package dependencies.  If the OP intends to install a package that
>>>> doesn't support other than 2.6, you install 2.6.
>>>
>>> It would be a pretty poor third party package which specified Python 2.6
>>> exactly, rather than (say) "Python 2.6 or later, but not Python 3"
> 
>     After a thread of clueless replies, it's clear that nobody
> responding actually read the build log.  Here's the problem:

There are a lot of clueless statements on websites around the world.
I'll just quote the one significant comment on the lysium.de page:

"""
There's actually no need to apply your patch to setup.py. Python complains 
about not being able to build those modules, but it will still build and 
install just fine without them.
#6  Alexander Fairley  on 2009-01-19 01:43
"""

which is unfortunately burried under an avalanche of "satisfied customer" 
replies. Alexander, you're my hero ;)

> 
>   Failed to find the necessary bits to build these modules:
> bsddb185
> dl
> imageop
> sunaudiodev
> 
> What's wrong is that the Python 2.6 build script is looking for
> some antiquated packages that aren't in a current RHEL.  Those
> need to be turned off.
> 
> This is a known problem (see
> http://pythonstarter.blogspot.com/2010/08/bsddb185-sunaudiodev-python-26-
ubuntu.html)
> but, unfortunately, the site with the patch for it
> (http://www.lysium.de/sw/python2.6-disable-old-modules.patch)
> is no longer in existence.
> 
> But someone archived it on Google Code, at
> 
> http://code.google.com/p/google-earth-enterprise-
compliance/source/browse/trunk/googleclient/geo/earth_enterprise/src/third_party/python/python2.6-
disable-old-modules.patch
> 
> so if you apply that patch to the setup.py file for Python 2.6, that
> ought to help.

That patch prevents setup.py from adding a few names of rarely 
needed/available modules to the list of missing modules. That's snakeoil.

OP: You can safely ignore the error message, the patch has no real-world 
effect.