On Apr 17, 2011, at 01:46 PM, Jan Groenewald wrote:

>Jan Groenewald <jan.groenewald@gmail.com> added the comment:
>
>I am trying to build www.sagemath.org on ubuntu 10.04 natty beta 2 for amd64. Bear with me.

As described in your follow up, the problem is really on 11.04.

>Sage includes a patched version of python2.6.4, and it fails to build
>modules nis and crypt.
>
>Upstream python 2.6.4, 2.6.6, and 2.7.1 fail to build with the same
>error with ./configure, make, as per the README. The patch proposed is for setup.py, which is not used here?
>
>Ubuntu has a packaged python 2.6.6 and 2.7.1 (default) which I assume
>is patched, and builds on their toolchain.

This is not related to PEP 3149 failures.  Ubuntu 11.04 introduced multiarch
directories for the underlying shared libraries used to link to the Python
extension modules.  Unpatched, Python's setup.py does not add the necessary
multiarch directories to the search paths, so some extensions won't build.

Ubuntu 11.04's Python packages have been patched to add the correct search
paths.  Upstream Python 2.7, 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3 have also been patched to
include the correct search paths, but fixed versions have not been released
upstream yet.  Python 2.6 won't be patched.

See issue 11715 for details.