NIS module included in Debian image but not in Alpine one

[antoine-roux]

Hello, the installed Python on Alpine and Debian is not strictly the same.
I'm trying to use the nis module on Alpine, but it is not compiled.

$ docker run python:jessie python -c 'import nis; print("OK")'
OK
$ docker run python:stretch python -c 'import nis; print("OK")'
OK
$ docker run python:slim python -c 'import nis; print("OK")'
OK
$ docker run python:alpine python -c 'import nis; print("OK")'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'nis'

I read somewhere that the Alpine libc does not include nis built-in. But libnsl is available on Alpine repos (https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/v3.7/community/x86_64/libnsl).
Can we imagine to have this feature in the future 3.7 Alpine image?

Thanks,
Antoine

[JayH5]

I tried including the libnsl-dev package in #249 (it's only available on Alpine 3.7) but compiling the nis module still failed with:

building 'nis' extension
gcc -Wno-unused-result -Wsign-compare -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -I./Include -I. -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/src/python/Include -I/usr/src/python -c /usr/src/python/Modules/nismodule.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-3.6/usr/src/python/Modules/nismodule.o
/usr/src/python/Modules/nismodule.c:17:21: fatal error: rpc/rpc.h: No such file or directory
 #include <rpc/rpc.h>
                     ^
compilation terminated.
The following modules found by detect_modules() in setup.py, have been
built by the Makefile instead, as configured by the Setup files:
atexit                pwd                   time

Failed to build these modules:
nis

[antoine-roux]

Maybe with something like libtirpc-dev?

[JayH5]

Huh, it does actually build and the import works if you install both libnsl-dev and libtirpc-dev. However, it's necessary to add /usr/include/tirpc to the include directories while building the nis module. I can't find a way to do that short of editing setup.py.

I'm not going to dig further into this as this isn't a feature I use, but I hope that helps.

[tianon]

Also relevant: https://github.com/tiran/peps/blob/ba2635cb59cd97264905ce32ef85f9456c1a5297/pep-9999.rst#nis (movement in Python upstream to remove nis entirely)