Greg Ward wrote:
On 20 September 2000, M.-A. Lemburg said:
Ah ok. Thanks... after having made the change I now get:
error: error in setup.cfg: command 'sdist' has no such option 'no_defaults'
I'm open to config files accepting hyphens as well as underscores. The current config parsing code was thrown together pretty quickly, and yes it *does* use ConfigParser. Accepting hyphens would make the documentation a bit simpler, which is always a good metric of software complexity.
Indeed :-)
The no_default vs. use_defaults could definitely be massaged a bit. It's not documented at *all*; in fact, the docs as written would lead you to believe that anything you see in "--help" output can be used in a config file (modulo the underscore/hyphen thingy).
Right, that's what I thought... didn't work out all the way, but would certainly make understanding distutils a lot easier.
But that's not so: some options are just "negative aliases" for others. The underlying reason for this is sound (--use-defaults and --no-default both set the same instance attribute: 'use_defaults'), but that's just an explanation, not an excuse. IMHO the config file should accept as close to what the command-line accepts as possible: this means hyphens too, and it means handling "negative alias" options.
Right again :-)
Hmmm. I'll look into it -- just added it to the TODO file, FWIW. Anyone who wants to give it a shot and submit a patch should look at the 'parse_config_files()' method in dist.py.
Apropos patch: have you seen the patch I posted here which allows distutils to compile PYC and PYO files in one go ? It basically adds a new util function compile() which takes care of the logic.
Python's sys module should really support e.g. sys.setoptimization() for this kind of task... it's on the plate, but we're in a feature freeze so it won't make it into 2.0.