i am trying to compile python in solaris 2.8.

ncurses incl files and libs are not in theis usual places (/usr/include,
/usr/lib)! so i usually set CPPFLAGS, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS and 
LD_RUN_PATH when compiling programs. that works nicely if all of 
the automake, autoconf and libtool machinery is used. but it seems that 
the python team has decided to do sthg unusual when building the 
modules...
===
building '_curses' extension
gcc -DNDEBUG -g -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC 
-fno-strict-aliasing -I. -I/tmp/Python-2.3.3/./Include -I/tmp/Python-2.3.
3/Include -I/tmp/Python-2.3.3 -c /tmp/Python-2.3.
3/Modules/_cursesmodule.c -o build/temp.solaris-2.8-sun4u-2.
3/_cursesmodule.o
In file included from /tmp/Python-2.Modules/_cursesmodule.c:113:
/tmp/Python-2.3.3/./Include/py_curses.h:43:21: ncurses.h: No such file 
or directory
===
adding CPPFLAGS or CFLAGS to the compile command would sort 
things out. the same thing happens to other modules as well (bz2 ie).

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It's too late for 2.4, but I will get this in for 2.5 .  I will try to add support 
for CC, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, and CPP (all of the environment 
variables listed by ``./configure -h``).

Basically the problem is that setup.py does not check these.  If you need 
a quick fix than just add the directories yourself (grep for Fink or 
DarwinPorts in setup.py to see the function calls).

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rev. 1.205 of setup.py and rev. 1.149 of Makefile.pre.in allow extension 
modules to be compiled with the directories specified in LDFLAGS and 
CPPFLAGS.  As for CFLAGS, that gets trickier.  For that situation I would 
set OPT or BASECFLAGS when running configure (be careful of the latter, 
though, since you really are not supposed to play with that).

Considering this bug closed and fixed.