Re: automake-1.11 test failure on darwin9 - instmany-python.test

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Peter,

thanks for the bug report.

* Peter O'Gorman wrote on Mon, May 18, 2009 at 03:43:00AM CEST:
> The instmany-python test is failing for me on Mac OS X 10.5.7. Looks
> like it is trying to install things into /Library/Python, and as I did
> not run make check as the superuser, can't.

Ouch.  This looks like a bug in python.m4, or like python doing
something we do not expect.  In any case, configuring with a local
--prefix should not cause us to try to install files below /Library.

First off, to see whether this really is due to the recent site
directory detection algorithm, can you try reverting this patch:
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2009-05/msg00022.html>
which is 6cfa5cb8a21957774301cf07cdcf012531274465 and then run
  make
  cd tests
  make recheck

to find out whether the issue is exposed with that patch only?

Then, I don't know python very well, at least not its distribution
semantics.  If we inquire sysconfig.get_python_lib with a prefix that is
below a user's $HOME, or otherwise outside system-specific directories,
shouldn't it not produce the system-wide site directory?  Where can I
find out more about this?  The python online documentation seems to
document the synopsis of this function but not the intended semantics,
so I can't say whether there is a bug with Python 2.5.1 on your Darwin
system (which version BTW) or not.

Even if it turns out to be an issue in Python, I have no idea yet how to
easily fix m4/python.m4 without regressing the site directory
computation on other systems.

I cannot reproduce this issue on the Darwin 8.11.0 I have access to.

Cheers,
Ralf

> FAIL: instmany-python.test (exit: 2)
> ====================================
> 
> /Volumes/Users/fink/src/fink.build/automake1.11-1.11-1/automake-1.11/tests:/Users/fink/var/lib/fink/path-prefix-g++-4.0:/Users/fink/bin:/Users/fink/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin
> instmany-python: running python -V
> Python 2.5.1
> === Running test ./instmany-python.test
> ++ pwd
> /Volumes/Users/fink/src/fink.build/automake1.11-1.11-1/automake-1.11/tests/instmany-python.dir
[...]
> + ../configure
> --prefix=/Volumes/Users/fink/src/fink.build/automake1.11-1.11-1/automake-1.11/tests/instmany-python.dir/inst
[...]
> checking for python... /usr/bin/python
> checking for python version... 2.5
> checking for python platform... darwin
> checking for python script directory... /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
> checking for python extension module directory...
> /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
> configure: creating ./config.status
[...]
> + make install
> Making install in long_subdir_name_with_many_characters
> make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'.
> test -z "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages" || ../../install-sh -c -d
> "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages"
>  /usr/bin/install -c -m 644
> ../../long_subdir_name_with_many_characters/npython1.py
[...]
> '/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/.'
> install: /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/./npython1.py: Permission denied
> make[2]: *** [install-nobase_pythonPYTHON] Error 71