py-xapian build fail: "py-sphinx module... no" (but yes)

[gessel]

Last few major system upgrades I haven't been able to get databases/py-xapian to build under Poudriere. I've been hoping it would just magically start to work as so much does thanks to the community, but as of FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE-p3, still no luck.

The error is:

checking /usr/local/bin/python3.11 version... 3.11
checking for python3 sphinx module... no (try installing package python3-sphinx
configure: error: Python3 bindings build dependencies not found

Which seems pretty straight forward: install textproc/py-sphinx, except it is and seems to have succeeded:

build of textproc/py-sphinx@py311 | py311-sphinx-5.3.0_3,1 ended at Sat May 10 09:45:55 PDT 2025
build time: 00:02:22

973 other ports built successfully, only py311-xapian-1.4.28 seems intractably recalcitrant. Any hints?

 

[SirDice]

It appears to get pulled in when DOCS is enabled. So you could simply disable this option and circumvent the issue.

DOCS_BUILD_DEPENDS=	${PYTHON_PKGNAMEPREFIX}sphinx>=0,1:textproc/py-sphinx@${PY_FLAVOR}
DOCS_EXTRA_PATCHES_OFF=	${PATCHDIR}/extra-patch-python3-Makefile.in

Not sure why it's not working correctly on your system, the port itself apparently builds fine on the package build servers.

 

[gessel]

Thanks for the suggestion and it makes perfect sense, but DOCS are disabled already.

I could upload the port build log, it might have a further hint as to why it's going wonky for me - it could be some make.conf option and perhaps the next step would be to disable all optimizations and try a build just to see if that narrows it down a bit. Or... maybe I could try toggling DOCS on just to contrary.

 

[gessel]

Tried setting build docs just for testing, no difference in outcome (still failed, same error). I'll try a plain make.conf next.

 

[SirDice]

but DOCS are disabled already.

Right. Turn it back on then. It looks like that extra-patch-python3-Makefile.in doesn't apply properly (or isn't complete), causing the error with ./configure. That's apparently still looking for py-sphinx, which isn't installed because the DOCS option was turned off.

The option is on by default, that's probably why the FreeBSD package builders don't have an issue building it.

 

[gessel]

Thank you very much for the help. I tried changing the config option but it keeps resetting to off: I unset DOCS in make.conf as some of the doc formats pull in a lot of dependencies which seems to make it impossible to manually set DOCS on without rebuilding all 1136 ports. py-sphinx is being built, I explicitly listed it trying to debug this back in 14.1 and gave up then too.