Tarek Ziadé wrote:
If the answer to that solution is just: "Distutils sucks anyways..", it is not really helpfull imho..
I don't see the point to write Distutils from scratch, instead of making it evolve.
If you can see a way to get from the current distutils code to something with a well-designed and well-documented API and a clean implementation, that would be fine by me. When I say it's fundamentally broken, I'm really talking about the API. My idea of what an API for a build system should be like is more like make or scons, which slice the functionality up in a completely orthogonal direction to the way distutils does. Maybe it would be possible to plug such a system in under the existing build_ext class. I don't know. I think I would like the same philosophy applied to other areas of distutils, not just compiling extensions. Otherwise it would feel like two incompatible systems bolted together. What we need right now, I think, is some discussion about a new API, unconstrained by any considerations of backwards compatibility or reuse of existing distutils code. Once we know where we're going, then we can think about the best way to get there. -- Greg