If you are doing something nobody here will listen you about because "you're doing it the wrong way", but you have to do it "the wrong way" for reasons too asinine to explain and also beyond your ability to control, you can try this:
Get libffi and install it into your user install area the usual way.
git clone https://github.com/libffi/libffi.git
cd libffi
./configure --prefix=path/to/your/install/root
make
make install
Then go back to your Python 3 source and find this part of the code in setup.py at the top level of the python source directory
ffi_inc = [sysconfig.get_config_var("LIBFFI_INCLUDEDIR")]
if not ffi_inc or ffi_inc[0] == '':
ffi_inc = find_file('ffi.h', [], inc_dirs)
if ffi_inc is not None:
ffi_h = ffi_inc[0] + '/ffi.h'
if not os.path.exists(ffi_h):
ffi_inc = None
print('Header file {} does not exist'.format(ffi_h))
ffi_lib = None
if ffi_inc is not None:
for lib_name in ('ffi', 'ffi_pic'):
if (self.compiler.find_library_file(lib_dirs, lib_name)):
ffi_lib = lib_name
break
ffi_lib="ffi" # --- AND INSERT THIS LINE HERE THAT DOES NOT APPEAR ---
if ffi_inc and ffi_lib:
ext.include_dirs.extend(ffi_inc)
ext.libraries.append(ffi_lib)
self.use_system_libffi = True
and add the line I have marked above with the comment. Why it is necessary, and why there is no way to get configure to respect '--without-system-ffi` on Linux platforms, perhaps I will find out why that is "unsupported" in the next couple of hours, but everything has worked ever since. Otherwise, best of luck... YMMV.
WHAT IT DOES: just overrides the logic there and causes the compiler linking command to add "-lffi" which is all that it really needs. If you have the library user-installed, it is probably detecting the headers fine as long as your PKG_CONFIG_PATH includes path/to/your/install/root/lib/pkgconfig.