Pyhunspell installation in virtualnev

Question

I have a problem with installation of pyhunspell bindings for hunspell library in python 3.2 virtualenv. I downloaded hunspell from here. I issued ./configure and make and it run all right. I avoided however to do make install because my purpose is to install it on virtualenv on a web server, where I have no root permissions.

Thus I downloaded pyhunspell bindings and unzipped it to the directory, where hunspell is made. I modified include_dir path in setup.py by adding correct destination and applied the patch which allows to build pyhunspell with Python 3. Then I ran python setup.py install (having activated the target virtualenv before), but I got this:

$ python setupy.py install
running install
running build
running build_ext
building 'hunspell' extension
gcc -pthread -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fPIC -D_LINUX -I./src/hunspell -I/usr/include/hunspell -I/usr/include/python3.2mu -c hunspell.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.2/hunspell.o -Wall
creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.2
gcc -pthread -shared -Wl,-O1 -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.2/hunspell.o -lhunspell-1.2 -o build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.2/hunspell.cpython-32mu.so
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lhunspell-1.2
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

It seems that linker cannot link something because it looks for it in system path, while I didn't install the library in the system. Can someone wiser than me in the arcana of C devise any workaround to this issue?

I'll add that I have no access to the real server yet, but I know it will have the system pretty much similar to my local one (Debian 7.0 Wheezy), so I decided to give it a try before I actually log in to the server. Is it possible that the library compiled on my computer would work also on the server, assuming it would also be some (stable probably) version of Debian?

Answer 1

There's no need to build Hunspell. Install the Wheezy packages libhunspell-1.3-0 and libhunspell-dev. It should work with HunSpell 1.3. Just modify setup.py to use libraries = ['hunspell'].

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FYI, the posted patch has a problem. It adds the methods of HunSpell as module functions. These receive the module as the first argument instead of the expected HunSpell instance. For example, if you call hunspell.spell, the process will probably segfault when it tries to use self->handle. You should fix the PyModuleDef to get rid of these mal-functions. Change line 273 of hunspell.c to use NULL instead of HunSpell_methods.