On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 2:03 PM, Oleg Dolomanov
it appears that somehow the 'file' command used by Python to determine its architecture fails in that particular setup (note the doc link later) and leads Python to call exit(1) (not bad for safe defaults!). I also discovered that in the documentation (not sure if that was originally there when I was implementing this, http://docs.python.org/2/library/platform.html) says that there are better ways to realise if this is a 32 or 64 bit system (like test: is_64bits = sys.maxsize > 2**32), and I am not sure if we should Python to do that decision (without changing anything) and if the failure actually tells us anything or should use the proposed way?
Okay, I've added the sys.maxsize check if the call to platform.architecture() doesn't work. The only issue with this is that sys.maxsize wasn't introduced until Python 2.6, so we can't use it by default yet. -Nat