On 20 March 2014 09:54, Vinay Sajip
Daniel Holth
writes: extensions without using distutils. The problem of invoking the compiler has been solved by many build systems and is not just a unique and mysterious distutils feature.
Did someone say it was? Building extensions is something distil does too, and without using distutils or setuptools.
Right, the problem is the lack of a standard interface for how the packaging system is supposed to invoke them - that is, *implementation independent* docs of what the various setup.py commands are *supposed* to do. The packaging system shouldn't have to care *how* setup.py is implemented, but at the moment, the behaviour is underspecified to the point where it's a matter of reverse engineering distutils and/or implementing what seems necessary and waiting to see if people complain. Cheers, Nick.