On Thu, 02 Dec 1999, Andrew M. Kuchling wrote:
Is it really necessary for people to develop their code using Distutils, as opposed to developing in their preferred environment and then wrapping things up for distribution? If I was debugging a C module, I don't think I'd bother compiling it through the distutils; more likely I'd just write a Makefile.pre.in and Setup.in.
Absolutely. Using Distutils we have been able to automate the making of our software. I have even just finished a little facility so that Pyfort can make a Fortran extension (although I am going to need community help getting data for the various Fortran compilers to flesh it out.) The important point here is that people who are not NORMALLY developers can BE developers. Despite not having memorized the location of Makefile.pre.in, and stie-packages, or even knowing that they exist, they can make and install extensions. For example, a user need only create a file like this: pyf('rs.pyf', 'rs', '.') name = 'eof_workbench' directory = '.' to make a Fortran extension using input file rs.pyf and loadling librs.a from directory ., picking up .py files to go with it from . and installing it as package eof_workbench. Assuming they call that file SETUP, they do pyfort -s SETUP python setup.py build_ext install and they can immediately use the package eof_workbench. Distutils doesn't have to be comprehensive. What Distutils does is lower the bar for learning how to make extensions.