"PP" == Pearu Peterson
writes:
PP> For your information, the module scipy_distutils from the SciPy PP> (www.scipy.org) package extends distutils quite a bit: it PP> provides definitions for a dozen of Fortran 77/90/95 compilers PP> from different vendors, it supports compilation of Fortran PP> sources and building (automatically generated) extension modules PP> to wrap Fortran and C libraries, etc. Thanks for the pointer! I had no idea what kind of extensions people had come up with and it's quite educational (for me at least) to see one. PP> to wrap Fortran and C libraries, etc. To achieve all that many PP> hooks from the standard distutils needed to be extended and I PP> cannot imagine if all that could have be done using just a PP> "small" API (whatever that would be). I guess I don't know what a "small" API would be either. My concern is that an extension could rely on accidents of the current implementation without realizing it. Since there's no documented API, there's no way for an extension writer to know what is intentional and what is accidental. PP> However, I don't know what kind of changes are you planning and PP> therefore I am not sure if they would have any impact to PP> scipy_distutils. I had specifically wondered about all the verbose arguments passed to distutils functions and the announce() method on some objects. I just checked in some changes that effectively ignores the verbose argument, and I wondered if it needed to be preserved at all. I see that the scipy_distutils passes the verbose argument to several functions, so removal of it would affect you. PP> What is the definition of handful people? Do you count extension PP> developers or the users of these extensions? If the later, one PP> would really need lots of hands when considering the current PP> user base of SciPy alone (to give some idea, currently there are PP> more than 100 subscribers to the scipy users mailing list formed PP> in less than one year). I think we would have to consider the users of the extensions, too. (But if you're the only one, we can figure something out <wink>.) Jeremy