VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 06 2005 - 20:00:30 CST

Justin,
  Thanks for the note. I had some similar problems on other platforms,
it's not just SGI. I noticed that bunch of modules fail to compile because
the Python configure script doesn't understand the difference between
64-bit and 32-bit builds, and when they go trying to find library dependencies
for some of the modules, the configure script chooses a 32-bit component
because it was the first it found, even though it's not usable to actually
link with. Fun stuff. I'm waiting for my bug reporting registration to go
live for the Python page, as soon as I'm able I'm going to file a bunch of
build system bugs on these items. I'm amazed that the Python developers
apparently haven't done any testing on 64-bit machines. Granted, I've been
through exactly the same pain and suffering with Tcl builds in the past, but
they seem to have largely fixed all of these problems in the last couple
years.

  John

On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 03:50:58PM -0800, Justin Gullingsrud wrote:
> It looks like you're in for some real fun on SGI:
>
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-bugs-list/2003-August/019674.html
>
> There's a suggested workaround to get the socket module to compile,
> but I haven't been able to get it work.
>
> Other than that, I got what seems to be a working 64-bit Python
> interpreter and static library built with Python 2.3.4. I had to edit
> config.status to change CC to cc 64 -mips4, similarly for CXX and
> LDFORSHARED, and I replaced ranlib with touch. If you want I can tar
> up what I have and send it to you.
>
> Justin
>
> On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 14:56:59 -0600, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> >
> > In my quest to upgrade VMD's built-in Python interpreter
> > to something less archaic than Python 2.2.2, I've been trying
> > to build and link the Python 2.3.x and 2.4.x series on all of
> > the VMD target platforms, but unfortunately the Python configure
> > scripts seem hopelessly broken for compilation on 64-bit
> > architectures such as Solaris, IRIX, etc. Has anyone successfully
> > compiled Python on 64-bit machines other than Linux x86_64?
> > (Linux x86_64 works by coincidence only due to the default
> > behavior of gcc on those systems)
> >
> > Unless I can get Python to compile and run cleanly on all of the
> > supported VMD target architectures, I'll be stuck shipping VMD 1.8.3
> > with the older Python 2.2.2 interpreter, which while old, does in fact
> > build correctly on 64-bit machines.
> >
> > I'm also battling getting Numeric compiled correctly on Win32, but that's
> > not as much of a deal killer since I do have Python itself built there.
> >
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> > --
> > NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
> > Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
> > University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
> > Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu Phone: 217-244-3349
> > WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/ Fax: 217-244-6078
> >
>
>
> --
> The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the
> philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world
> is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an
> underlying reality.
> -- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man" 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078