I finally found time (and energy) to try out the td176 HPUX host on HP testdrive.

I downloaded the python25.tar.bz2 snapshot from svn.python.org, and built it with the installed gcc 3.4.3.  First, I got errors in the ctypes tests because the _ctypes_test extension/shared library could not be loaded because of a missing symbol __divsf3.

Googling around I found http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Libgcc.html which mentions a GCC runtime library libgcc.a (see the link 'soft float library routines' on ths page).  When this library is specified when building _ctypes_test.so, all ctypes unittests pass.  Without any crash.

It is strange, to link against the libgcc.a library it seems needed to specify the location of the library '/usr/local/lib/gcc/ia64-hp-hpux11.23/3.4.3/' - no idea why.  Can some HPUX guru provide some insight?

The attached patch to setup.py is what was needed, but it is a hack of course.
File Added: setup.py.patch