Re: Building Python 3 on old distributions

[jose dot marchesi at oracle dot com (Jose E. Marchesi)]

    One question asked at today's glibc BoF at the Cauldron was how hard it 
    was to build Python 3 on old GNU/Linux distributions, should we require it 
    for the glibc build.
    
    I tried building Python 3.7.0 on Ubuntu 10.04, as the oldest distribution 
    I have readily to hand for testing such things.  I needed to build libffi 
    3.2.1 first:
    
    ./configure --prefix=/scratch/jmyers/python-install
    make
    make install
    
    and then could build Python 3.7.0:
    
    ./configure --prefix=/scratch/jmyers/python-install
    CPPFLAGS=-I/scratch/jmyers/python-install/lib/libffi-3.2.1/include
    LDFLAGS="-L/scratch/jmyers/python-install/lib
    -Wl,-rpath,/scratch/jmyers/python-install/lib"
    make -j8
    make install

    The resulting Python does not support the ssl module (OpenSSL is too old 
    and I didn't try building newer OpenSSL locally).  It *does* support 
    hashlib.

Thanks for checking!  It is good that python3 can be easily installed
locally.