I was having trouble compiling psycopg. It would link against the version of Python that was installed via RPM on my Mandrake 9.1 box, which was version 2.2.3. I knew I had to link against the latest version of Python that I had installed from source. At the recent PyGTA meeting I attended, I asked if anyone knew about compiling psycopg from source. No one volunteered an answer but the fellow sitting next to me was looking over my shoulder as I attempted various things. He noticed that I had not specified where the python executable was but had only specified the version. Once we figured out how to do that, psycopg compiled fine. The command line parameters follow.

./configure \
--with-postgres-includes=/usr/local/pgsql/include \
--with-mxdatetime-includes=. \
--with-postgres-libraries=/usr/local/pgsql/lib/ \
--with-python-version=2.3 \
--with-python-exec-prefix=/usr/local \
--with-python=/usr/local/bin/python

Once we did this, it was a simple matter of make and then make install to install psycopg. However, there was still no joy because this time, as soon as I tried to make a connection via SQLObject to PostgreSQL, Python threw an exception. See below:

>>> from SQLObject import *
>>> conn = PostgresConnection(host='localhost', db='doedb',user='cilkay')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in ?
File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/SQLObject/DBConnection.py", line 547, in __init__
import psycopg
ImportError: /usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/psycopgmodule.so: undefined symbol: PQresultErrorField

I suspected this still had something to do with library paths so I decided to try this on another machine with later versions of PostgreSQL and Python. I had been wanting to try Gentoo for some time so I decided to install it on one of the machines in the office. More on that next time...