Building with a libreadline.so located outside the ld.so.conf search path fails

[mjpieters]

BPO	40647
Nosy	@mjpieters

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

Show more details

GitHub fields:

assignee = None
closed_at = None
created_at = <Date 2020-05-16.15:27:30.017>
labels = ['3.7', '3.8', '3.9', 'extension-modules', 'build', 'invalid']
title = 'Building with a libreadline.so located outside the ld.so.conf search path fails'
updated_at = <Date 2020-05-16.15:54:44.614>
user = 'https://github.com/mjpieters'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2020-05-16.15:54:44.614>
actor = 'mjpieters'
assignee = 'none'
closed = False
closed_date = None
closer = None
components = ['Extension Modules']
creation = <Date 2020-05-16.15:27:30.017>
creator = 'mjpieters'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 40647
keywords = []
message_count = 3.0
messages = ['369054', '369055', '369057']
nosy_count = 1.0
nosy_names = ['mjpieters']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'normal'
resolution = 'not a bug'
stage = None
status = 'open'
superseder = None
type = 'compile error'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue40647'
versions = ['Python 3.7', 'Python 3.8', 'Python 3.9']

[mjpieters]

This issue goes back a long time. The libreadline handling in the modules setup.py doesn't add the location of the readline library to the runtime library paths:

    self.add(Extension('readline', ['readline.c'],
                       library_dirs=['/usr/lib/termcap'],
                       extra_link_args=readline_extra_link_args,
                       libraries=readline_libs))

This requires the readline library to have been added to a traditional location or has taken care of either ld.so.conf or LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

I'm building a series of Python binaries with a custom --prefix where I also installed a local copy of readline (so both are configured with the same prefix), and while setup.py finds the correct library, importing the compiled result fails because no RPATH is set.

This could be fixed by adding the parent path of the located libreadline shared library as a runtime_library_dirs entry:

    readline_libdirs = None
    if do_readline not in self.lib_dirs:
        readline_libdirs = [
            os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(do_readline))
        ]

    self.add(Extension('readline', ['readline.c'],
                       library_dirs=['/usr/lib/termcap'],
                       extra_link_args=readline_extra_link_args,
                       runtime_library_dirs=readline_libdirs,
                       libraries=readline_libs))

[mjpieters]

Actually, this won't do it either, as self.lib_dirs already contains the --prefix.

Clearly, I just need to add -R=${PREFIX}/lib to CPPFLAGS.

[mjpieters]

Last but not least, this is essentially a duplicate of https://bugs.python.org/issue4010