Quoth Mark Hammond, on 31 March 1999:
Building from what Greg said, I agree that _certain_ command-line params can be mandated - they are designed not to be configurable, as messing them will likely break the build. But there also needs to be a secondary class that are virtually unconstrained.
I think there will have to be some way to accomodate platform dependencies in a Distutils build. Eg. Win32 extensions are allowed to compile only on Win32, and from what I'm hearing it sounds as though lots of Windows-specific compiler options might need to be snuck in to build a given extension. Or I might want my extension to be built with -O2 as long as gcc is the compiler, no matter how Python was built. Ultimately, this means that you will be free to stick "-n32" into your compiler command line if you're on an SGI and using SGI's compiler, even though this will most likely break things. Partly this is a documentation/social engineering thing, but it can also be addressed by making the compiler options that can (and sometimes must) be set in a portable way part of the compiler abstraction model -- hence the idea of a "compiler.debug" flag, which will control the "-g" switch on Unix C compilers and the local equivalent elsewhere.
[Sorry - as usual, speaking having kept only a quick eye on the posts, and not having seen the latest code drop...]
That's quite all right -- just scatter enough droplets of knowledge, I'll filter through the ones that aren't relevant to the code. Greg -- Greg Ward - software developer gward@cnri.reston.va.us Corporation for National Research Initiatives 1895 Preston White Drive voice: +1-703-620-8990 x287 Reston, Virginia, USA 20191-5434 fax: +1-703-620-0913