document STATICBUILD

[Sridhar Ratnakumar]

A while ago I had contributed a patch to automatically download pre-built dependencies on Windows and statically link against them. See http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~vcs-imports/lxml/trunk/revision/2994

This requires the use of STATICBUILD environment variable (which is what the PyPM build uses). This environment variable configures lxml for both static linking and auto-download of pre-built dependencies (both on OSX and Windows).

The installation document speaks of `STATIC_DEPS=True` ... which works only on OSX. Perhaps that should be changed to this?

  $ STATICBUILD=true easy_install lxml

This works on both OSX and Windows 32-bit (TODO: we need to do the same for 64-bit).

Additionally STATIC_DEPS can be deprecated, would you agree?

[Sridhar Ratnakumar (srid)]

BTW, the original idea behind 'STATICBUILD' is to informally/gradually standardize on an environment variable that will allow Python users to install a module without having to install the dependencies themselves (especially on Windows). So for instance, "STATICBUILD=true easy_install numpy" *can* be made to work by downloading pre-built ATLAS libraries.

[Pascal (p-oberndoerfer)]

STATIC_DEPS allows me to download sources of dependencies and go from there.

Am I right in assuming STATICBUILD would need acces to pre-built (binary) libs?

Thanks for clarifying this to me!

BR, Pascal

[Sridhar Ratnakumar (srid)]

STATICBUILD in linux will download pre-built libraries on Windows only. On Linux and Mac, it downloads official sources and builds them.

Note that: ideally we should be able to *build* on Windows too. We could convert the scripts here http://people.canonical.com/~sidnei/lxml/ to Python and add it to setup.py. This will make it easier and straightforward to create binary eggs and exes when a new lxml release comes up.

[Pascal (p-oberndoerfer)]

On Mac (at least for 10.4 and 10.5) the libraries libiconv and zlib (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/lxml/+bug/610511) are needed as well. Could you please confirm STATICBUILD is taking care of this?

My current setup to provide eggs for Mac is based around STATIC_DEPS. The proposed deprecation would make it more difficult to continue this.

Best regards,

Pascal