Friendly system wise compilation needed

Hi there
it is a Royal Mess to compile recent version of astropy under a unix system due to its obsessive bundling of every possible library and bugs all over the setup system (It used to be fine for all versions <= 4.0.1).

One of your contributor "Olebole" is an expert in this and it is only thanks to him that I succeeded a build for current 4.2 version. I have been using its patches, published on the Debian repository, more than 12 are required to just not getting a crash while running python setup.py build! At some point I was wondering if I was compiling IRAF-2.16 or python3-astropy ;)

They are there: http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/astropy/astropy_4.2-1.debian.tar.xz

Please merge them, or ask him consultancy if you need to understand how shared/system libraries works.

Thank you.
Best,
Chris.

Start by reviewing the Debian patch set at the linked astropy_4.2-1.debian.tar.xz archive and the setup.py build path mentioned in the report. Determine which build and system-library problems the patches address, then verify that a recent Unix build works without the Debian patch series and without runtime crashes.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.