Re: improving PL/Python builds on OS X

On Wed, 2013-05-08 at 18:24 +0100, Dave Page wrote:
> It's failing on Linux. Even worse, it configures fine and then builds
> without error. There is a message spewed out by configure, but it
> doesn't contain the words warning or error. Given that I explicitly
> said I wanted Python support when I ran configure, it should certainly
> fail with an error at configure time. We only noticed this was a
> problem when the QA guys started diving in to more detailed tested, as
> we don't watch for every message in the 50+ MB of logs our automated
> build systems generate.

It worked before because we used to allow linking shared libraries
against static libraries on some platforms. But that was more or less a
lie because it doesn't work on 64-bit platforms.

ActiveState Python contains a static library with PIC files. There is
no obvious way to detect that, which is why we don't support it
directly. You can sort it out yourself by building with

make shared_libpython=yes

In the long term, find a way to detect whether the library is usable.