I am trying to compile a package on Mac OSX 10.6.5. The package's install script relies on distutils. The problem is that the computer's default gcc is version 4.2 (I determined this by just running gcc --version in a terminal window) but when I run 'python setup.py build', I see from the output that the distutils is choosing gcc-4.0 instead of 4.2 This is a big problem because the code I am using require gcc >= 4.2. I do not have admin rights on this machine, so as a workaroud, I created some symlinks that send gcc-4.0 to gcc-4.2. The result is the code compiles, but the generated .so files do not work (when I try to import them in python, I get errors complaining about a missing init function in the shared object).
I have tried compiling this code on a different mac (10.6.6) and it works like a charm: distutils chooses 4.2 without being forced to do so and I can import the generated shared object without a problem. So, what I would like to do is to compile the code on my computer without having to do this symlink trickery...I just want distutils to choose 4.2 automatically as it should. I have tried taking the .so files that compile properly and transferring them to my computer, but that fails for a number of reasons (they are linked against libraries that are not present on my machine/are a different version that those installed).
Does anyone have any advice here?
Thanks, Josh
distutils has been deprecated in NumPy 1.23. 0 . It will be removed for Python 3.12; for Python <= 3.11 it will not be removed until 2 years after the Python 3.12 release (Oct 2025).
The distutils package provides support for building and installing additional modules into a Python installation. The new modules may be either 100%-pure Python, or may be extension modules written in C, or may be collections of Python packages which include modules coded in both Python and C.
In theory the plugin allows you to write Python scripts that can run inside GCC as it compiles code, exposing GCC's internal data structures as a collection of Python classes and functions. The bulk of the document describes the Python API it exposes.
To force distutils to use a separate compiler, you can redefine a few variables via the environment. First, find out what distutils is using as defaults:
>>> from distutils import sysconfig
>>> sysconfig.get_config_var('LDSHARED')
'gcc-4.0 -Wl,-F. -bundle -undefined dynamic_lookup'
>>> sysconfig.get_config_var('CC')
'gcc-4.0'
Next you need to redefine those, substituting in the version of gcc you'd like to use:
% LDSHARED="gcc-4.2 -Wl,-F. -bundle -undefined dynamic_lookup" CC=gcc-4.2 \
/usr/bin/python setup.py build_ext
Keep in mind that the sysconfig defaults are pulled from the Makefile which was originally used to compile python, so fudging with them may produce unintended results:
>>> path = sysconfig.get_python_lib(plat_specific=1, standard_lib=1)
>>> os.path.join(path, 'config', 'Makefile')
'/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/config/Makefile'
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