On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 09:19:01PM +0100, Danny Milosavljevic wrote: > An alternative workaround is to use this instead: > > diff --git a/gnu/packages/python.scm b/gnu/packages/python.scm > index be452f062..04c944d84 100644 > --- a/gnu/packages/python.scm12/bin/shore-updates/guix$ /gnu/store/k7029k5va68lka > +++ b/gnu/packages/python.scm > @@ -229,6 +229,8 @@ > ;; before 1980". Work around this by setting the file times in the > ;; source tree to sometime in early 1980. > (lambda _ > + (setenv "CONFIG_SHELL" (which "bash")) > + I think this is the better solution to the libffi / ctypes issue. It also fixes python-minimal@3 to use the bundled libffi. We added libffi to python-minimal@3's inputs in d0b73960db051baa468fc1a0fbab21fa9f89f885 to work around a similar issue. In Python 3.7, the bundled libffi will be removed, and we will have to build our minimal Python-3 variant with an external libffi package: https://bugs.python.org/issue27976 Here's a patch that fixes this problem for python-minimal@2. I don't want to change python-minimal@3 this late in the core-updates cycle; we can do it in a python-updates branch after core-updates.