Building Python 3 on old distributions

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On Sunday 09 September 2018 03:15 AM, Joseph Myers wrote:
> I think anything not in the python standard library (such as matplotlib)
> should be avoided for normal "make" and "make check" (without ruling out
> e.g. having a script using matplotlib for plotting benchmark results,
> which people would have to explicitly run should they wish to do so).

That sounds good.

> (I'm unsure about whether modules depending on ctypes and thus on libffi
> are or are not an issue, or quite what you'd end up losing if you don't
> have ctypes - although when building Python 3.7 without libffi, the
> install of Python failed because it ran ensurepip which failed for lack of
> ctypes.)

I think we have a good starting point; trying to get a minimal install 
that doesn't depend on libffi may be a nice thing to aspire to if 
feasible, but not necessary right now.

> https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Style_and_Conventions#Python_usage_conventions
> now includes a statement on what modules may be used.

Looks good, thanks.

> I'm incidentally dubious of the use of the scripts/ directory in some
> cases where we currently use it - I think that scripts only actually used
> from a single subdirectory and not from toplevel would better go in that
> subdirectory rather than scripts/ (which covers at least a few of the
> scripts there).

Agreed.

Siddhesh