I've built Python 2.6.2 with a prefix of "" for an embedded system, so it's installed into /bin/python, /lib/python2.6/, etc.

If I run a script with "python /tmp/script.py" or by putting in a #!/bin/python and executing it directly, sys.path is missing the leading slashes:

['/tmp', 'lib/python26.zip', 'lib/python2.6/', 'lib/python2.6/plat-linux2', 'lib/python2.6/lib-tk', 'lib/python2.6/lib-old', 'lib/lib-dynload']

This causes all module imports to fail. I can work around this by making /usr a symlink to / and running the script as "/usr/bin/python /tmp/script.py", or by setting PYTHONHOME=/ before starting Python.

In Modules/getpath.c, search_for_prefix() calls reduce() on argv0_path at the end of a do-while loop, so "/bin" becomes "" and the loop terminates. Then there's a call to joinpath(PREFIX, "lib/python2.6"), where PREFIX is "", and this fails (no leading slash).

calculate_path() warns:

Could not find platform independent libraries <prefix>

and falls back to joinpath(PREFIX, "lib/python2.6") again, which still fails.

I was thinking I could work around it by building with prefix="/" instead of "", but the behaviour is the same - I don't know why, yet.

I thought I remembered a bug that mentioned prefix="/".  What I found was Issue1676135, which might have something to do with your last question.

Yes, that does look related. The fix from Issue1676135 seems to handle --prefix="/" properly, and from what I can tell PREFIX does get set to "/".

There is also code in getpath.c to set sys.prefix to "/" if it's "".

The correct prefix for configure is actually "", not "/", to avoid double-slashes - but neither one seems to work at the moment.

There's so much detail provided that I think this should be easy for someone who understands C code.

I took a shot at this. Build is successful and imports happen. Tests are ok except test_sysconfig, and that is because of sys.prefix being set to '/'. I've raised issue19340 for that.

About the patch, i'm not sure how to completely test for false positives(joinpath now returns <SEP><suffix> if <prefix> is null). I could not think of any issues from the current calls to joinpath.

This is a very old bug report. Python has changed a lot in the past decade. Please reopen the bug if you still can reproduce the issue with Python 3.9 or newer.