[Libguestfs] distutils use in hivex libdnet libnbd (and more) [was: Re: Help needed triaging build failures without distutils]

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 10:53:12AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>   https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/m4/guestfs-python.m4

Actually some help for how to replace it would be useful too as
sysconfig is not an exact replacement for distutils.sysconfig.  In
particular get_python_lib doesn't exist, and I can't find an exact
replacement.

Original code:

  $ python3 -c 'import distutils.sysconfig; print(distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib(1,0));'
  /usr/lib64/python3.11/site-packages

Potential replacement:

  $ python3 -c 'import sysconfig; print(sysconfig.get_path("platlib"));'
  /usr/local/lib64/python3.11/site-packages

Maybe the original code was wrong, but I guess we don't want to
install site packages in /usr/local when running under RPM at least.
Note it's used here:

https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/python/Makefile.am#L50-L54

(We do not -- and cannot -- use ordinary Python install mechanisms.)

Rich.

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Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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