Hi all -- at long last, I found the time to hack in the ability to compile extension modules to the Distutils. Mainly, this meant adding a 'build_ext' command which uses a CCompiler instance for all its dirty work. I also had to add a few methods to CCompiler (and, of course, UnixCCompiler) to make this work. And I added a new module, 'spawn', which takes care of running sub-programs more efficiently and robustly (no shell involved) than os.system. That's needed, obviously, so we can run the compiler! If you're in the mood for grubbing over raw source code, then get the latest from CVS or download a current snapshot. See http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/implementation.html for a link to the code snapshot. I'm still waiting for more subclasses of CCompiler to appear. At the very least, we're going to need MSVCCompiler to build extensions on Windows. Any takers? Also, someone who knows the Mac, and how to run compilers programmatically there, will have to figure out how to write a Mac-specific concrete CCompiler subclass. The spawn module also needs a bit of work to be portable. I suspect that _win32_spawn() (the intended analog to my _posix_spawn()) will be easy to implement, if it even needs to go in a separate function at all. It looks from the Python Library documentation for 1.5.2 that the os.spawnv() function is all we need, but it's a bit hard to figure out just what's needed. Windows wizards, please take a look at the 'spawn()' function and see if you can make it work on Windows. As for actually compiling extensions: well, if you can figure out the build_ext command, go ahead and give it a whirl. It's a bit cryptic right now, since there's no documentation and no example setup.py. (I have a working example at home, but it's not available online.) If you feel up to it, though, see if you can read the code and figure out what's going on. I'm just hoping *I'll* be able to figure out what's going on when I get back from the O'Reilly conference next week... ;-) Enjoy -- Greg -- Greg Ward - software developer gward@cnri.reston.va.us Corporation for National Research Initiatives 1895 Preston White Drive voice: +1-703-620-8990 Reston, Virginia, USA 20191-5434 fax: +1-703-620-0913