On Apr 26, 2011, at 09:45 PM, Matthias Klose wrote:

>Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org> added the comment:
>
>> Barry A. Warsaw<barry@python.org>  added the comment:
>> 
>> I'm closing this as invalid for Python, since I believe this is strictly an
>> Ubuntu bug caused by an out-of-date kernel on the build farm.
>
>that's where I disagree. a configure check should not be dependent on the
>running kernel.  I assume in the majority of cases you won't build against a
>current kernel, so the a fix in python maybe could be a runtime check.  Such
>configure checks will fail for cross builds too.

Perhaps so, but that's a totally different issue.  Such a change wouldn't be
appropriate for stable releases, so it could only make it into Python 3.3.  It
might be an interesting thing to work on, but I'd suggest opening a new bug
and seeing if anyone wants to work up a patch for that.

>Note that packages on Ubuntu are always built on the current kernel of the
>current LTS release, on Debian on current kernels of the current stable
>release.  So there is nothing "out-of-date".

"Out-of-date" was probably an incorrect choice of words.  My understanding was
that this bug was caused by a problem in the kernel that caused the configure
check to fail, at the time the Maverick Python 2.7 package was built, and that
the build machines have since been updated, correcting the problem.  At least,
current PPA builds don't have this problem.

In any case, I still think this specific issue is more appropriately tracked
in the Launchpad bug, and I have requested an SRU for a rebuild.