[Discuss-gnuradio] x86_64 issues I'd like input about.

[David P. Reed]

Having updated to FC6 on my x86_64 laptop, I decided to play with the 
install process there.   A couple of issues have arisen that I would be 
interested in from folks who understand more about gnuradio than I.

1. Thought most things are fine (as they have been in the past), 
reviewing the test output, qa_feval.py fails in "make check".   This 
seems to be due to gr.feval_dd not working.   Before I dig into 
debugging it, am I correct in assuming it works on 32-bit platforms?   
If so, it's one of those stupid 64-bit problems I keep finding in code 
that is only lightly tested on 64-bit machines. 

2. The problem with Fedora's x86_64 python library layout is well known, 
but I found two approaches to work around it as I've been exploring the 
depths of python search paths, etc.   One (which works like a charm) is 
to put a gnuradio.pth file in lib64/site-packages, that contains:

   gnuradio
   gnuradio/gr
   gnuradio/vocoder
   gnuradio/pager
   ../../../lib/python2.4/site-packages/gnuradio
   ../../../lib/python2.4/site-packages/gnuradio/gr
   ../../../lib/python2.4/site-packages/gnuradio/vocoder
   ../../../lib/python2.4/site-packages/gnuradio/pager

This forces all of the paths to be searched for imports.
It's ugly, though it works.
I think a better solution (which I will try shortly) is to put in in 
each lib64 subdirectory (listed above) an __init__.py file that uses 
pkgutils.extend_path()
to force modules to search both lib64 and lib directories in parallel 
for names.  I don't fully understand pkgutils.extend_path, but it seems 
to be designed for just this purpose.