Martin,

I've been quietly reading all of the back and forth regarding this problem.

Your suggestion for using the CC variable to fix the problem that I 
reported won't work - I already tried it and based on what others are 
reporting, you are beating a dead horse. Believe me I would rather not 
modify anyone's code in order to build something. The problem is that 
the CC variable doesn't fix the link stages and overall your autconf 
build is broken particularly as it relates to flowing variables down to 
sub builds.

I don't know why you are resisting this change. I took the time to 
report the bug, proposed a fix /_*and*_/ contributed the patch that 
would make the Python build process more standard relative to the vast 
majority of open source packages that use autoconf. I am glad to see 
that my patch appears to be generic enough that it works on other 
platforms as well. I didn't have to post a bug report let alone 
contribute a patch but, I believe strongly that is what open source is 
all about. As the maintainer you don't have to accept either the bug or 
the patch but, resisting without good cause will discourage further 
contributions - certainly from me because I won't waste my time 
submitting something when I know that a maintainer of a package is being 
closed minded. We do a lot of work with open source software here and it 
is our policy to contribute back to the community as much as possible. 
However, when we run into a brick wall we quickly give up because we 
can't justify the time and effort. As an example, we have completely 
suspended all contributions to the asterisk project. We operate a very 
large asterisk environment with a lot of fixes and improvements that I 
am sure lots of others would love to have but the maintainer's attitude 
was that a Sun Solaris platform was not important. What the maintainer 
doesn't know is that many of our fixes and changes affect /_*all*_/ 
platforms. So now they get nothing from us and the asterisk community as 
a whole is deprived of the benefits of our work. I also know that many 
others have also suspended contributions for the same reason and as a 
result the asterisk package suffers. The resistance on your part to 
recognizing this problem and a fix is unjustified.

Overall it improves the Python package if it can be built on more 
platforms in different ways - especially if it uses the standard 
autoconf approach that the majority of other open source packages use. 
Those of us that have to deal with building almost a hundred different 
packages for different platforms and architectures very much appreciate 
not having to deal with unnecessary exceptions or idiosyncrasies.

I don't care whether you incorporate the change or not - we certainly 
will continue to patch future versions of Python (we have a fully 
automated build process here) in order to produce a successful build. 
Clearly the genie is out of the bottle and others will also likely use 
the patch for their builds. Why not just make everyone happy and 
incorporate it or a reasonably similar approach that properly implements 
the flow of /_*all*_/ autoconf variables to the sub-builds of the Python 
package so that more people can take full advantage of Python on their 
64 bit platforms and also deal with whatever unique build requirements 
that they might have.

Sincerely,
Bob Atkins

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

>Martin v. Löwis <martin@v.loewis.de> added the comment:
>
>  
>
>>This is what you get when you try to build a 64-bit Python on a biarch
>>machine (64-bit kernel, 32-bit userspace), using a gcc that generates
>>natively 32-bit objects (therefore, you *must* pass the '-m64' option
>>for the compiler):
>>    
>>
>
>Or you install an additional, different, C compiler that defaults to
>AMD64.
>
>  
>
>>1) As you could see above, actually you need CFLAGS in order to compile
>>Python correctly. As far as I could investigate, the reason you need
>>this is because of the tests that are done by configure. Without the
>>CFLAGS, configure will think it's building a 32-bit Python, despite of
>>the '-m64' flag in BASECFLAGS. So, do we need to propagate CFLAGS
>>through Makefile or not? IMHO, we do.
>>    
>>
>
>Not necessarily. I think you can achieve the same effect by specifying
>CC="gcc -m64" to configure.
>
>  
>
>>2) Even with CFLAGS and BASECFLAGS set, the compilation fails. Using
>>LDFLAGS makes the compilation process continue a little more, but it
>>still doesn't solve the problem. AFAIK, the reason it doesn't solve the
>>problem is, again, because we are not propagating it through the
>>Makefile. Can you see any different reason? Also, should we propagate
>>LDFLAGS through Makefile? IMHO, we should.
>>    
>>
>
>Again, if you specify CC as above, you don't have to.
>
>  
>
>>Ohh, before I forget: compilation succeeds if we use only CC='gcc -m64'.
>>But again, I don't think this is a solution for this issue :-).
>>    
>>
>
>Why not?
>
>Regards,
>Martin
>
>_____________________________________
>Tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
><http://bugs.python.org/issue1628484>
>_____________________________________
>
>
>  
>