Building Python 3 on old distributions

[Joseph Myers]

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.

If you want to build glibc on Ubuntu 10.04, you'll also need newer GCC, 
newer binutils, and either a newer kernel or to cross-test since the 
2.6.32 kernel is too old to test glibc anyway.  So I think this is older 
than any distribution that is actually sensible for building glibc.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com