2.2.1 Running ./configure
Description: Running ./configure
Keywords: modpython

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2.2.1 Running ./configure

The ./configure script will analyze your environment and create custom Makefiles particular to your system. Aside from all the standard autoconf stuff, ./configure does the following:

- Finds out whether a program called apxs is available. This program is part of the standard Apache distribution, and is necessary for DSO compilation. If apxs cannot be found in your PATH or in /usr/local/apache/bin, DSO compilation will not be available.

  You can manually specify the location of apxs by using the --with-apxs option, e.g.:

          $ ./configure --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs

  It is recommended that you specify this option.

- Checks your Python version and attempts to figure out where libpython is by looking at various parameters compiled into your Python binary. By default, it will use the python program found in your PATH.

  If the first Python binary in the path is not suitable or not the one desired for mod_python, you can specify an alternative location with the --with-python option, e.g:

          $ ./configure --with-python=/usr/local/bin/python2.3

- Sets the maximum number of locks reserved by mod_python.

  The mutexes used for locking are a limited resource on some systems. Increasing the maximum number of locks may increase performance when using session locking. The default is 8. A reasonable number for higher performance would be 32. Use --with-max-locks option, e.g:

          $ ./configure --with-max-locks=32

  New in version 3.2.0

- Attempts to locate flex and determine its version. If flex cannot be found in your PATH configure will fail. If the wrong version is found configure will generate a warning. You can generally ignore this warning unless you need to re-create src/psp_parser.c.

  The parser used by psp (See 4.9) is written in C generated using flex. This requires a reentrant version of flex which at this time is 2.5.31. Most platforms however ship with version 2.5.4 which is not suitable, so a pre-generated copy of psp_parser.c is included with the source. If you do need to compile src/psp_parser.c you must get the correct flex version.

  If the first flex binary in the path is not suitable or not the one desired you can specify an alternative location with the --with-flex option, e.g:

          $ ./configure --with-flex=/usr/local/bin/flex

  New in version 3.2.0

- The python source is required to build the mod_python documentation.

  You can safely ignore this option unless you want to build the the documentation. If you want to build the documentation, specify the path to your python source with the --with-python-src option, eg.

          $ ./configure --with-python-src=/usr/src/python2.3

  New in version 3.2.0