In Anaconda3-4.0 symlink `python-config` is missing

[dmitry-kabanov]

I have Anaconda3-4.0 installed on my machine.

When I look into the bin directory, I see that there symlinks python3-config and python3.5-config linked to the python3.5m-config. However, python-config symlink is missing.

[juharris]

Any plans to add this?

[ilanschnell]

We don't do anything special with respect to the python-config scripts. Basically we run ./configure, make, make install. So the Python source doesn't add python-config for Python 3.5. Is the "missing" sym-link creating any problems?

[juharris]

On Ubuntu the system's python-config was being used which caused confusion. It was particularly confusing because the system's default was Python 2 even though my Conda installation defaulted to Python 3.

[ilanschnell]

When your not sure which command is used, you can always type which python-config.

[juharris]

Yep that's how I figured out the issue. The problem is that it's not obvious to everyone that Anaconda doesn't come with python-config.

[dmitry-kabanov]

I cannot recall right now how exactly the issue of missing python-config in Anaconda occurred because it was a long time ago. However, it undoubtedly caused some pain if I went to the Github and raised and an issue :-) I think I was compiling scikits.odes when the issue occurred.

So, due to the absent python-config in the Anaconda itself, the Ubuntu's python-config was called, which is for Python 2 (I was using Ubuntu 14.04 at the time).

I think this issue should be reopened.

[alexbw]

Just ran into this bug, with a separate package which requires the use of python-config to get some build flags.

[flipphillips]

Same - in my case I was building libsharp and it was using the Homebrew python's python-config.

[vsbogd]

I faced this issue when trying to build C++ library Python bindings using pybind11 module installed in conda environment. pybind11 CMake macro use python-config to get C++ module suffix. As conda doesn't contain python-conifg symlink pybind11 uses mixed environment: conda python interpreter and system python-config. As result conda python interpreter doesn't see built module.

[ktbarrett]

I have also faced the same issue building Kactus2, which uses python-config to determine the include paths to pull in Python.h. @ilanschnell Can you justify why you are not providing python-config? This is a command used by many build scripts for extension modules to query the Python build for its configuration. This is not an optional component unless you want to suggest an alternative for all these use cases and push that change onto everyone else...