On Dec 20, 12:06am, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
Subject: Re: [Distutils] Disposition of C extensions and packages "A.M. Kuchling" wrote:
Questions:
1) A general Python question about packaging style: Is mixing C extensions and Python modules in one package tree a bad idea? It makes the whole tree platform-dependent, which is probably annoying for sites maintaining Python installation for different architectures.I have been using that setup for two years now with all of my mx extensions and so far it has been working great.
If you maintain packages with C extensions for several platforms, you can simply install the packages under the platform subdirs in /usr/local/lib/python1.5 -- one copy for every platform. Disk space is no argument anymore nowadays.
Agreed, disk space is not an issue, but file duplication is not very nice. I think this is a real weakness in Python: on one hand we have platform independent extensions which are great on the other hand we have native extensions when performance is required. This is, at least for me (in scientific computing) what makes Python such a great tool, BUT Python does not provide a mechanism to split a single package into platform dependent and platform independent part. We maintain Python and a number of packages for IRIX, SunOS, Dec Alpha OSF, Win32 and linux ... and having to update 5 .py files at every bug fix is a real pain.
-Michel