Nmap Development: python install question

[Aaron Leininger <rilian4 () hotmail com>]

I have been upgrading some of my boxen to 4.85beta3. I have one test box that I use that has no GUI installed. I used 
the ./configure --without-zenmap option on this box to speed up the compile since I had no use for zenmap in this case. 
I know zenmap uses python but I was surprised to find that the regular install of nmap from source now requires python 
and python-dev to be installed in order to successfully complete. The ndiff script at the end of the 'make install' 
command is where the failure was. 

I got: 
   invalid Python installation: unable to open /usr/include/python2.5/pyconfig.h

After installing python2.5-dev, ndiff was successfully installed and thus the 'make install' threw no errors. 

I guess it would have been nice to have the ndiff part of 'make install' throw a cleaner error. My python installation 
was perfectly valid, just missing the dev package. After looking at what setup.py is doing in the ndiff sub-folder, am 
I right in thinking that it is python itself that is throwing this error? Will that make it harder to alter how it 
appears? 

Unfortunately, I forgot to preserve the entire output from 'make install' so that is making it harder to trace back. 
Aaron 

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