[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: The PantherPythonFix installer and C++ extensions

[Bob Ippolito]

On Dec 29, 2004, at 6:25 PM, Jack Jansen wrote:

>
> On 29-dec-04, at 11:40, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> [Bob notes that my PantherPythonFix installer will break C++ 
> compilation because distutils simply replaces the first component of 
> LDSHARED with "c++"]
>>> Any suggestions as to what to do to get c++ compilation fixed?
>>
>> I can think of two ways:
>>
>> 1. Patch distutils to actually do 
>> os.environ['MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET'] = '10.3' because 
>> CCompiler.spawn doesn't take an environment dict.
>> 2. Patch distutils to skip over environment variables (basically 
>> change that "0" into something smarter).   This is probably less 
>> desirable because who knows where this happens, and who knows what 
>> third party compiler subclasses used this original stupid code as a 
>> template.
>
> Both of these mean that "the simple installer that just puts a new 
> Makefile into lib/python2.3/config" has just gone out the window:-(

Yeah.. I'd rather have broken C++ support than broken linker support 
though.. so this patch is better than no patch.

> I think I have a better alternative to both of these suggestions 
> (basically what I just checked in for 2.5a0: allow the Makefile to 
> force a setting for MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET, unless it was set 
> already), but that still leaves the problem that there's more files to 
> patch.
>
> We could of course replace sysconfig.py and sysconfig.pyc in place, 
> but I don't feel happy about that. (So: please argue that it isn't a 
> problem).

I'm +1 for replacing sysconfig.py.  It's known to be exactly the one 
included with 2.3.0.  The user gets what they deserve if they made 
their own changes to sysconfig.py here.

> Or we could install a newer, patched distutils into 
> /Library/Python/2.3. But that has the problem that it'll obliterate 
> any other newer distutils the end user may have installed. Also not a 
> good idea.

-1.. you would also need to use a weird .pth hack to make sure it gets 
into sys.path before stdlib..

-bob