modpython support missing from Ganglia

[Andy Botting]

The Python module checks scripts from the ganglia-monitor-python package are effectively useless as libganglia1 does not include /usr/lib/ganglia/modpython.so, which it did in Bionic.

The packages from 19.10 appear to be the same upstream Ganglia version, but do include Python support and in fact, appear to work fine when installed on Focal.

Is it possible to include the Python support again to these packages in Focal, or has it been dropped because it depends on Python 2.7?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Niklas Edmundsson (niklas-edmundsson)]

This indeed has to be a packaging bug. The last changelog entry says "Build using python2" but there is no dependency of anything python in the ganglia-monitor package:

Depends: libapr1 (>= 1.2.7), libc6 (>= 2.14), libconfuse2 (>= 3.2.1~), libganglia1 (= 3.6.0-7ubuntu4), libpcre3, zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4), adduser

So, this package needs to be rebuilt correctly on focal to really build with python2 so modpython.so gets built.

[Roger Oscarsson (roger-oscarsson)]

Easiest fix is just adding python-dev-is-python2 to build dependencies instead of python2-dev. This creates the magic link that makes the configure script think that python is available.

Debian source/build package uses python-dev instead, but that is just a virtual package which ends up being either python-dev-is-python2 or python-dev-is-python3. But python3 does not work since the configure script uses print without parentheses.

If one is willing one look into if the python binary is actually needed. Since modpython.so is just a plugin for ganglia it should just use libpython2 and that is what configure should look for. But that might be too much work.