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When using some distutils functions, distutils attempts to use buildtime
files like Makefile and pyconfig*.h as data sources. For instance, this
snippet::
 from distutils.command.install import install
 from distutils.core import Distribution
 dist = Distribution({"name": "foopkg"})
 cmd = install(dist)
 cmd.ensure_finalized()
There's two reasons this should change.
1) Some Linux distributions separate the python runtime and buildtime
files and put the buildtime files in a -devel package. Depending on
these buildtime files means that the -devel package can be needed for
running python scripts. For instance, here's the traceback that occurs
when the previous commands are run without python-devel on Fedora Linux::
 Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
 File "/usr/lib/python2.5/distutils/cmd.py", line 117, in
ensure_finalized
 self.finalize_options()
 File "/usr/lib/python2.5/distutils/command/install.py", line 273, in
finalize_options
 (prefix, exec_prefix) = get_config_vars('prefix', 'exec_prefix')
 File "/usr/lib/python2.5/distutils/sysconfig.py", line 493, in
get_config_vars
 func()
 File "/usr/lib/python2.5/distutils/sysconfig.py", line 352, in
_init_posix
 raise DistutilsPlatformError(my_msg)
 distutils.errors.DistutilsPlatformError: invalid Python installation:
unable to open /usr/lib/python2.5/config/Makefile (No such file or
directory)
2) keeping the information in a Makefile and *.h files and then having
regular expressions pull the information out is fragile and not what the
tools were meant for. Using a defined data format is much better.
The variables necessary for building extensions should be placed in a
data file of some sort. This can be built by the configure script at
the same time as it's substituting variables into the Makefile and
pyconfig files.
xml is good for interoperability and we have good modules in the std
library for that now. .ini is less verbose and we have modules to deal
with that as well.

I've noticed this, too, and I agree with Toshio's observations. Tarek,
do you have any opinions?

For Fedora, I've fixed this (I hope) by special-casing those two files:
 %{_libdir}/python%{pybasever}/config/Makefile
 /usr/include/python2.6/pyconfig-{32|64}.h
making them part of the core python package.
See downstream bug here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=531901
(BTW, downstream, we rename pyconfig.h and generate a stub that #includes either pyconfig-
32/64 so that both 32 and 64-bit devel packages can be installed on 32-bit hosts; we patch 
distutils so that it parses the wordlength-specific file)

> For Fedora, I've fixed this (I hope) by special-casing those two files:
Sorry; for "fixed", read "addressed"; this covers part 1 of the issue, 
but not part 2.

This is a problem indeed. 
One solution would be to generate a module in the stdlib that contains
all these info, when configure is called.
as a matter of fact, I am currently working in a branch to add a module
called "sysconfig" to the stdlib, that contains installation paths
extracted from distutils/sysconfig and site.py, so the stdlib has only
one place to handle those.
This module will basically be the last spot to look for data in makefile
and pyconfig.h, so maybe we could inject in it a condensed version of
these files, in the form of a dict.
(I'll send a mail on python-dev about this)

see http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-November/094232.html
(notice that the dependency in install can be removed easily because it
just reads variables from sys and does not require to import sysconfig)

I am closing this since Fedora has fixed the issue on their side.
On a side note: I am working on this new sysconfig module, in a branch
called tarek_sysconfig

Hey tarek, the main thrust of this bug for me was storing the data in an
inappropriate format and not having an API to get at it; things that I
think the sysconfig branch will address. Does it make sense to have a
bug to track that progress? Does it make sense for that bug to be this
one or a new one?

I think the future sysconfig module (http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distutils2/src/tip/docs/design/wiki.rst) addresses part of the issue: It will use a configparser file to store installation directories. There is nothing about other build-time variables, though; this could be added to finally remove the brittle Makefile parsing in sysconfig.
There is no bug to track this work that I know of.

#9807 has been recently opened.

... and #9807 spawned #9878.