buildmailman fails under natty

[Curtis Hovey]

make build (after hacking Makefile python=python2.6) fails under natty.

***** Distutils is not available or is incomplete for /home/curtis/Work/launchpad/<lp-branch>/bin/py
Could not configure Mailman:
checking for --with-python... /home/curtis/Work/launchpad/python-upgrade-love-0/bin/py
checking Python interpreter... /home/curtis/Work/launchpad/python-upgrade-love-0/bin/py
checking Python version... 2.6.6
checking Python's email package... ok
checking that Python has a working distutils... make: *** [compile] Error 1

python-setuptools 0.6.14-5ubuntu1 has python2.6 files

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I can hack mailman's own ./configure to force its build python 2.7 and all is well. Hacks are not needed to Lp's own Makefile. I think this implies that the natty package is bad.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

I don't remember which version of Mailman is in Launchpad, but you may want to upgrade to 2.1.14 to get full Python 2.7 support.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Lp is currently 2.1.12. It did build Python 2.7. It runs in launchpad.dev. Its test pass too. Lp and the testrunner are Python 2.6.6

The bug is that confguration test:
        $PYTHON conftest.py
died. I can take that exact script and play it in my system pythons (attached). 2.7 gives a yes, 2.6 gives a no. pdb shows that
        pdothpath = distutils.sysconfig.get_config_var('CONFINCLUDEPY')
        if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(pdothpath, "Python.h")):
            res = "yes"
        else:
            res = "no"
returns no because /usr/include/python2.6/Python.h does not exist.

So I am more convinced that this is an issue with Natty's Python 2.6

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Installing python2.6-dev fixes this issue. python2.6-dev must be added to launchpad developer dependencies or Launchpad is update to run on python 2.7 (which is is python-dev).

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

we don't need to worry about natty.