Robin Becker <ro...@reportlab.com> writes: > On a Ubuntu trusty system I ran > ./configure --prefix=/home/rptlab/PYTHON > make && make install > and get an error related to the ctypes module not being importable. > > I needed to do > > sudo apt-get install libffi-dev > ./configure --prefix=/home/rptlab/PYTHON --with-system-ffi > make && make install > > Something in setup.py seems to want ctypes irrespective of what I give > to configure; I don't actually know what the alternative to > --with-system-ffi does, but it didn't work for me.
"libffi" contains the so called "foreign function interface" (an interface that allows code written in one language to call code written in another language). Likely, "ctypes" depends on it. Since some time, "ctypes" is part of Python's standard library. It is likely, that the Python test suite contains tests verifying that it could be build successfully. Your observations seem to indicate that "ctypes" contains its own "foreign function interface" specification and that this specification does not fit to the libraries available on your system. The "with-system-ffi" likely tells the Python generation process to use the system "foreign function interface" rather than its own. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
