Ubuntu packages needed to compile Python 2.7

Question

I've tried to compile Python 2.7 on Ubuntu 10.4, but got the following error message after running make:

Python build finished, but the necessary bits to build these modules were not found:
_bsddb             bsddb185           sunaudiodev     
To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the module's name.

What packages do I need? (setup.py was not helpful)

Answer 1

Assuming that you have all the dependencies installed (on Ubuntu that would be bunch of things like sudo apt-get install libdb4.8-dev and various other -dev packages, then this is how I build Python.

tar zxvf Python-2.7.1.tgz
cd Python-2.7.1

# 64 bit self-contained build in /opt
export TARG=/opt/python272
export CC="gcc -m64" 
export LDFLAGS='-Wl,-rpath,\$${ORIGIN}/../lib -Wl,-rpath-link,\$${ORIGIN}/../lib -Wl,--enable-new-dtags'
./configure --prefix=$TARG --with-dbmliborder=bdb:gdbm --enable-shared --enable-ipv6
make
make install

The only modules that don't build during make are:

_tkinter - I don't do GUI apps and would use wxWindows if I did
bsddb185 - horribly obsolete version of bdb
dl - deprecated in 2.6              
imageop - deprecated in 2.6
sunaudiodev - obsolete interface to some SparcStation device I think

Next I collect any .so files that are not already in the Python install directories and copy them over:

# collect binary libraries ##REDO THIS IF YOU ADD ANY ADDITIONAL MODULES##
cd /opt/python272
find . -name '*.so' | sed 's/^/ldd -v /' >elffiles
echo "ldd -v bin/python" >>elffiles
chmod +x elffiles
./elffiles | sed 's/.*=> //;s/ .*//;/:$/d;s/^              *//' | sort -u | sed 's/.*/cp -L & lib/' >lddinfo
# mkdir lib
chmod +x lddinfo
./lddinfo

And then add setuptools for good measure

#set the path
export PATH=/opt/python272/bin:$PATH

#install setuptools
./setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg

At this point I can make a tarball of /opt/python272 and run it on any 64-bit Linux distro, even a stripped down one that has none of the dependencies installed, or a older distro that has old obsolete versions of the dependencies.

I also get pip installed but at this point there is a gap in my notes due to some failed struggles with virtualenv. Basically virtualenv does not support this scenario. Presumably I did easy_install pip and then:

export LD_RUN_PATH=\$${ORIGIN}/../lib
pip install cython
pip install {a whole bunch of other libraries that I expect to use}

After I'm done installing modules, I go back and rerun the commands to collect .so files, and make a new tarball. There were a couple of packages where I had to muck around with LDFLAGS to get them to install correctly, and I haven't done enough thorough testing yet, but so far it works and I'm using this Python build to run production applications on machines that don't have all the support libraries preinstalled.