Python fails to build the 'math' module on AIX 5.3 - plus several other modules

[drkirkby]

Hardware and software

• IBM ​RS/6000 7025 F50
• 4 x 332 MHz 32-bit PowerPC CPUs
• 3 GB RAM
• A fairly wide mixture of disks sizes (3 x 9 GB, 1 x 18 GB, 1 x 36 GB and 1 x 73 GB)
• DDS-4 tape drive
• AIX 5.3 (A POSIX certified operating system)
• gcc 4.2.4 downloaded from ​pware
• sage-4.6.alpha1 with a patched python package to get around #9995

The problem

As reported at #9995, the python package initially failed to build at all, as Python's configure script thought the compiler was broken. Once that was sorted out, Python built, but failed to install due to this error:

Sleeping for three seconds before testing python
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named math
math module failed to import

real    37m23.968s
user    34m46.809s
sys     6m19.683s
sage: An error occurred while installing python-2.6.4.p10

When I look at build log for Python (attached), I see a rather large number of modules actually failed to build, so math is not the only one, but it is one which causes Sage to fail to build.

Failed to find the necessary bits to build these modules:
_bsddb             _curses_panel      _hashlib
_ssl               bsddb185           gdbm
linuxaudiodev      ossaudiodev        spwd
sunaudiodev
To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the module's name.


Failed to build these modules:
_bisect            _bytesio           _codecs_cn
_codecs_hk         _codecs_iso2022    _codecs_jp
_codecs_kr         _codecs_tw         _collections
_csv               _ctypes            _ctypes_test
_curses            _elementtree       _fileio
_functools         _heapq             _hotshot
_json              _locale            _lsprof
_md5               _multibytecodec    _multiprocessing
_random            _sha               _sha256
_sha512            _socket            _sqlite3
_struct            _testcapi          _tkinter
_weakref           array              audioop
binascii           bz2                cmath
cPickle            crypt              cStringIO
datetime           dbm                dl
fcntl              future_builtins    grp
imageop            itertools          math
mmap               nis                operator
parser             pyexpat            readline
resource           select             strop
syslog             termios            time
unicodedata        zlib

Strangely enough, despite these modules not building, a large number of packages in Sage that require python would actually build on AIX.

Since AIX is low on the priority list, I will not spend much time on this yet, until the 64-bit Solaris and OpenSolaris ports are complete.

I will investigate this more later, and report any problems upstream if they are needed. It might be something quite simple that's causing a lot of modules to fail to build on AIX.

[drkirkby]

Install log for Python. This is based on a patched python package, which gets around the problem at #9995. This package is not yet part of Sage.

[embray]

I don't believe anyone's been maintaining support for AIX or HP-UX for some time. Putting in sage-wishlist for now in case there is still a desire for it out there, otherwise these tickets should be closed (most of them are probably no longer relevant in any case but I have no obvious way to check this).

[mkoeppe]

This is outdated and should be closed.