I'm attempting to build Python 2.6.2 from source on my Linux system. It has ncurses installed on /usr/local/, and curses.h is on /usr/local/include/ncurses. So curses.h isn't found on the include path, and those packages fail in the Python build.
What's the right solution to this? Is Python supposed to include <ncurses/curses.h>? Should /usr/local/include/ncurses be in the include path? Should there be a link from the files in the ncurses directory to /usr/local/include?
Or is there some simpler solution?
With many Open Source packages, you can set:
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include"
or even:
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include/ncurses"
before running the configure script. I haven't compiled Python recently enough to be sure that works, but it probably does -- I have ncurses installed under /usr/gnu (because /usr/local/ is automounted and contains antiques) and I don't remember having to use anything special to get it to work.
Double-checked...
The configure script only includes <curses.h>. I had to use:
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/gnu/include -I/usr/gnu/include/ncurses"
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/gnu/lib"
./configure
To get the Python (2.5) configure to accept curses. You'd replace 'gnu' with 'local' for your configuration.