[Distutils] Workarounds for C++ module linking issues - OK?

Sept. 25, 2003

      Hi,

It's me again.  With the exception of the clean problem in my previous
email, I think I've got my distutils-based setup script working
properly.

To do so, I've needed to add a few workarounds where distutils wasn't
doing the right thing, and I couldn't convince it to do so by ordinary
means.  The changes revolve around the fact that the module is written
in C++, and I want to provide support back to Python 1.5.2.

They are as follows.

class build_mkext(build_ext):
    # force use of C++ compiler (helps on some platforms)
    def finalize_options(self):
        self.run_command('config')

        import os
        cc = os.environ.get('CXX', sysconfig.get_config_var('CXX'))
        if not cc:
            cc = sysconfig.get_config_var('CCC') # Python 1.5.2
        if cc:
            os.environ['CC'] = cc
        build_ext.finalize_options(self)

    def build_extension(self, ext):
        # work around linker problem with MacPython 2.3
        if sys.platform == 'darwin':
            try:
                self.compiler.linker_so.remove("-Wl,-x")
            except: pass
        # work around linker problem with Linux, Python 2.2 and earlier:
        # despite setting $CC above, still uses Python compiler
        if sys.platform == 'linux2':
            try:
                ext.libraries.append("stdc++")
            except: pass
	[...]

Does this all look OK?  I realize it's not the cleanest thing in the
world, but such workarounds seldom are.  I just don't want to do
something that will break in the near future, and this is the first
distutils setup script I've written. :-)

If you need to see the rest of the file, it's at:

	<http://web.sabi.net/temp/setup.py>

Thanks,

-- 
=Nicholas Riley <njriley@uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>