Re: gar.conf.mk: little surprises...

[guenther <guenther rudersport de>]

On Thu, 2005-06-16 at 16:30 -0400, Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D. wrote:
> I ran into some python-2.4 dependency issues with last week's release so
> I thought I would try building this week's release using python-2.4.1
> instead of python-2.3.5, which is the current "default" on my system.
> 
> I edited gar.conf.mk, setting the python environment variable
> 
> 	PYTHON=/usr/bin/python2.4
> 
> kicked off 
> 
> 	make parnoid-install > make_paranoid-install.log 2>&1 &
> 
> in the ./bindings directory, and went off to do some other things.
> 
> Later I took a look at the log and noticed that the build of libxml++
> was using
> 
> 	/usr/bin/python
> 
> which is a link to python2.3.5. 
> 
> Hmmm... Why is that???
> 
> Setting the python environment variable is a really good idea *provided*
> all of the GNOME applications bother to check for that environment
> variable before hunting around the file system in the usual places for
> an acceptable version of python. As we can see, some do, some don't.
> 
> This is a coding standards problem.

Maybe, yes. Anyway this would be more appropriate to tell the libxml++
hackers or file a bug for it.

Without having a look at the respective code I suspect they used
whatever 'which python' returned (which should be the systems default,
shouldn't it?).

With a look at the respective code it gets even more confusing. libxml++
doesn't seem to use Python at all, this search returns nothing:

  $ find . -type f -exec grep -H -i python {} \;

Thus wherever /usr/bin/python comes from is not libxml++ code but a
(unused) default test?


Not sure at this point, how the $PYTHON variable in gar.conf.mak is
supposed to affect the default Python, anyway. Is this a commonly used
variable to identify the Python to use? (Yes, I'm not a Python type of
guy... ;)

...guenther


-- 
char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0  ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4";
main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}