Did My Python Build Fail?

Core Workflow
1

Hello, I recently started reading the Python Developer’s Guide and am walking through the “Setup and Building” section (Setup and Building). Because I’m on macOS (Ventura), I installed the additonal dependencies mentioned in the docs using homebrew:

brew install pkg-config openssl@1.1 xz gdbm tcl-tk

After completing the configure and make steps, I see the following mesage:

The necessary bits to build these optional modules were not found:
_gdbm
To find the necessary bits, look in configure.ac and config.log.

Checked 106 modules (31 built-in, 74 shared, 0 n/a on macosx-13.4-arm64, 0 disabled, 1 missing, 0 failed on import)

There is no message on the build failing/succeeding (the docs indicate I should be seeing a “Python build finished successfully!” message if the build succeeded).

Did my python build fail? If so, any tips on how I can start to debug the issue?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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Welcome, @karlahrnndz! Unfortunately, the devguide instructions are a bit out of date at the moment. For current builds of the main or 3.12 branches, I don’t think you will see that “success” message anymore. Failure to build the _gdbm extension module is normally not a problem unless you specifically need to test the dbm module with gdbm, which is a third-party library; without it, the dbm module falls back to another data store option. There is a pending update to the devguide that gives updated recipes for building with Homebrew on macOS and that should solve the missing _gdbm problem. See Use targeted env vars for overriding compiler/linker args on macOS by erlend-aasland · Pull Request #1058 · python/devguide · GitHub

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Thank you so much Ned!

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