[magnus@therning.org: Python distutils without python-dev?]

[Matthias Klose]

On Sat, 2005-07-16 at 23:34 +0100, Magnus Therning wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 11:10:14AM +0200, Dennis Kaarsemaker wrote:
> >On za, 2005-07-16 at 09:19 +0100, Magnus Therning wrote:
> >>Is there a reason to provide distutils somewhat crippled like this, or
> >>is it a bug?
> >
> >There is a reason: the same reason that build-essential and sshd aren't
> >installed by default. Aunt Tilly won't be needing python-dev (including
> >distutils), just like she won't need build-essential or sshd, so why
> >install it by default?
> 
> The python module distutils is part of python2.4 (installed by default
> since ubuntu-desktop needs it), but it seems useless without installing
> python2.4-dev. So, it seems Aunt Tilly get's a worthless distutils
> whether she needs it or not, and if she ever would need it she will see
> the error message:
> 
>  error: invalid Python installation: unable to open /usr/lib/python2.4/config/Makefile (No such file or directory)
> 
> Then Aunt Tilly needs to find out what package contains this makefile
> and install it.
> 
> Is this a bug or not?

Not a bug. distutils can be used to build and install pure python
modules and applications. The -dev package is needed to build python
extensions. Usually more stuff than python-dev is needed to sucessfully
build an extension, i.e. a C and/or C++ compiler, and another -dev
package, if you build a binding to a project written in C, i.e. mysql,
dbus, gtk.

  Matthias