The package listed in the dev guide may not exist depending on the version of Ubuntu. It may be necessary to use python3.3 or python3.4.

Since you are saying that it is "sometimes" necessary to use a different package, perhaps we should be saying that in the devguide?  And providing the possible names.

On Ubuntu 13.10, using python3 did not install the dependencies (apt reported using the python3-defaults source package instead of python3). The python3.4, package does not exist, but the python3.3 package did work.

This may be that we're specifying the wrong package or that the upstream Ubuntu package has a bug or maybe we just need to use the specific package depending on what's available in the ubuntu version.

barry, what do you think?

The `python3` binary package is a sort of meta package that brings in the interpreter (and some ancillary stuff) for all supported Python 3 versions.  For Ubuntu 14.04 that will be just python3.4.  But if you want to build the interpreter from source (e.g. an hg clone) on an Ubuntu system, you'll need to bring in the Build-Depends for the specific interpreter package you want.  That would be python3.4 or python3.3, etc.  It's generally okay to `sudo apt-get build-dep python3.3` on a-pre-14.04 Ubuntu to get all the build-deps for Python 3.4.  There maybe something you'll need to install manually, but I can't think of what that is.

OK, so the devguide currently has 

  sudo apt-get build-dep python3

which did something on Glenn's machine, but did not enable him to build the optional packages.  So the question is, what should we put in the devguide as the correct build-dep to install?  Is it build-dep for the same version as the system python for that particular system?

On Apr 14, 2014, at 05:47 PM, R. David Murray wrote:

>OK, so the devguide currently has 
>
>  sudo apt-get build-dep python3
>
>which did something on Glenn's machine, but did not enable him to build the
>optional packages.  So the question is, what should we put in the devguide as
>the correct build-dep to install?  Is it build-dep for the same version as
>the system python for that particular system?

I guess I would recommend:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep python3.4

with a fallback to

$ sudo apt-get build-dep python3.3

The drag is if they have a really old version which only has python3.2, or an
even newer future version that has only python3.5.

Uploaded new patch with a little more about getting build-deps installed.

New changeset 84ccbb961f26 by R David Murray in branch 'default':
#21215: update debian/ubuntu build-dep instructions.
http://hg.python.org/devguide/rev/84ccbb961f26

Thanks, Glenn.