[pylucene-dev] building JCC on Windows with MinGW

[Andi Vajda]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Bill Janssen wrote:

>> Now I'm running into trouble loading jcc in python, because it can't
>> find the JVM dll:
>>
>>      from _jcc import initVM
>>  ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.
>>
>> If I attempt to use jcc to compile Lucene, I get the pop-up box
>> saying, "This application has failed to start because jvm.dll was not
>> found.  Re-installing the application may fix this problem."
>
> This is kind of nasty.  Turns out I need $JAVAHOME/jre/bin/client on
> my PATH before "import jcc" will work in Python.  This is the logical
> equivalent of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH problem on Unix.

Yes, very much so.

> So, we need to figure out how to do this for Windows Python.  We really 
> want Python (rather, the JCC __init__.py file) to look in the Windows 
> registry and do the right thing with what it finds there (basically, 
> adding the right location for the jvm.dll to sys.path), before it attempts 
> to import either "jcc" or "_jcc".

It's not sys.path (that's where PYTHONPATH ends up), it's the env's PATH or, 
more precisely, the process's executable search path that needs to be 
updated. I don't know of a linker way to do this on Windows. Once the 
process has started, my understanding is that it's too late already.

In Chandler, we have a starter process that starts python after setting the 
proper search path.

Andi..