How to build and install the Metakit DB for Python on MacOSX

{ Posted on Feb 10 2009 by david }
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Categories : Code Sample, Geek, How-To, Technology

Ever since I used it years ago on a geek-project for my Zaurus, the Metakit DB has always been a favorite of mine. I had the chance to use it again on another personal project and this time on MacOSX. Unfortunately, the prebuilt binaries on the Metakit site are for older versions of MacOSX, so I had to build it myself.

Normally one would simply follow the Metakit installation instructions, but they are old and didn’t work correctly with 10.5 Leopard. I scraped enough information together from the Internet to get it working, but I had to do a lot of research. To save others the same hassle, I have put together all of the changes and put them here in their entirety:

Building Metakit

Make sure you have Xcode installed on your system before starting.

Get the latest source from the Metakit downloads page. At this time the latest version is metakit-2.4.9.7.tar.gz.

Uncompress the archive in a work directory and run the following commands:

> cd builds
> ../unix/configure --with-python=/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5

Note: Your Python install might be in a different location. If so, give the --with-python arg the proper value.

“Fat” binary setup

If you need this to run on the PPC architecture you will need to make a couple of modifications to ./builds/Makefile after running configure, otherwise you can skip this step and build the binaries with make.

Find CXXFLAGS = $(CXX_FLAGS) and change to the following:

CXXFLAGS = $(CXX_FLAGS) -arch ppc -arch i386 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk

Find SHLIB_LD = g++ -dynamiclib -flat_namespace -undefined suppress and change to the following:

SHLIB_LD = g++ -dynamiclib -flat_namespace -undefined suppress -arch ppc -arch i386

Build the binaries

Run your typical Makefile commands:

> make
> make test

Installing Metakit

Rename the shared library which is now in the ./builds directory:

> mv Mk4py.dylib Mk4py.so

And copy the following files to /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/Extras/lib/python (be sure to adjust the path name for your version of Python):

../python/metakit.py
./Mk4py.so

Testing Metakit

At this point you should have a working system and ought to be able to run the following command in a Python shell without issue:

>>>from metakit import *

Enjoy !

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