[Arianne-general] building python to work with the server (a success)

[Joe L. <ly...@ge...>]

	I've had success today with building the arianne server on
freebsd, and getting it to run.  Previously I was getting errors just
like many other people, where it couldn't perform the action "import
ServerTab" from arianne.py.

So, after ages of playing around, and not understanding what was built,
versus what I needed built, I found that you can build a shared version
of python, but they don't provide a nice configure option or make
option.  If you're having trouble with the method I'm going to describe
(which worked for me), I suggest looking at
http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html#3.30 where I had gotten the
information which is what I'm basing my description from.

Most of you probably have python2.2 installed, so before you uninstall
and start fresh, just go into your python installation directory and
run the following:
make OPT="-fpic -O2"
mkdir .extract
cd .extract; ar xv ../libpython2.2.a; cd ..
gcc -shared -o libpython2.2.so .extract/*.o
rm -rf .extract

Naturally, from here, you need to copy libpython2.2.so to your
/path/to/lib/python/config directory.  (mine, for example was
/usr/local/lib/python2.2/config).
I'm not sure if you need to create a link from
/path/to/lib/python/config/libpython.so to
/path/to/lib/python/config/libpython2.2.so or not.  I did, and I don't
want to redo it, so I'm gonna let someone else explore that
possibility.
If you have a weird setup like Smart (on irc) had, just simply put the
.so file whereever your .a file already was. (and hope for the best.)

Once you have the .so file in your python/config directory, you need to
recompile arianne.  This time, you should notice that it will create a
file called ServerTab.so and put that in the
{arianne_prefix}/lib/arianne/python directory.

Reading through that python faq, one will find that both mac & windows
(although i'm not sure on macosx, since that's unix based) compile
python shared by default.  Weird things, IMO.

Naturally, this description is based off the experiences of merely
myself, so they may not work for everyone, and may need some revision
for others.

-Joe