[Pythonmac-SIG] Bus error failure while building readline

[Jack Jansen]

Stephane and Tony,
Both of you seem to have installed fink stuff. I haven't, so 
that's why your seeing problems I don't see, could you help me 
debugging this? I don't want to install fink, exactly because of 
the problems you're seeing: if I were preparing the distribution 
on a system with lots of fink-installed stuff there's too much 
chance of breaking things for people who don't use fink. 
(Especially since one of the fink-people told me they're moving 
away from the policy of putting everything into /sw I'm afraid 
to taint my system, I'd like to keep it as vanilla as possible).

I'd like the distribution to run unmodified both for people 
using vanilla OSX and people using fink-enhanced OSX, but for 
this I need feedback (such as the 'ln' issue). And if it turns 
out to be too much work at the very least there'll need to be a 
note in the readme file telling people about things like the 
LN=/bin/ln trick.

On to the problem at hand, which seems to be with readline for 
both of you, although the actual symptoms are different. In both 
cases setup.py seems to be thrown into confusion.

In Tony's case I think that the problem is that you have 
/usr/local/include/termcap.h, which makes setup.py guess you 
have termcap installed into /usr/local, and hence the termcap 
library in /usr/local/lib/termcap.a (or .so). If there is a 
legitimate reason for having termcap.h and not termcap.a (i.e. 
if this isn't caused by some partial install or other local 
problem): could you suggest a mod to setup.py to detect this 
situation?

Stephane's problem is a different one: here we have a conflict 
of curses versions. Apple ships a very old (and unusable to 
Python) curses version, and while the newer library correctly 
obscures the older one (in libSystem.dylib) something apparently 
still goes wrong. My guess is that the bus error happens when 
setup.py tries to actually import the readline module it has 
just created (a sanity check it does for all modules it builds). 
Could you try importing the module under gdb to get a stacktrace 
and see where it fails?

Has anyone gotten the readline module to build under recent 
versions of OSX Python? How?
--
- Jack Jansen        <Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com>        
http://www.cwi.nl/~jack -
- If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- 
Emma Goldman -