At 17:20 16/12/98 +0100, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

Greg Ward wrote:

...

On the superficial front, Marc-Andre hasn't convinced me that sysconfig is a better name than sys.config.

So the reasons I renamed it from sys.config to sysconfig were simply:

I think I favour this, but not strongly.

...

No! At least not in the long term: as Greg Stein pointed out, the config module (whatever it gets called) should just be generated when Python is built. Or were you talking about the near term, where we will need a distutils release that works with Python 1.5.2 and is allowed all manner of grotesque hackery to work around the lack of a config module, such as digging up and parsing Python's config.h, Makefile, and Setup?

I wouldn't consider this grotesque hackery.

I would. But it doesn't matter. What matters is not how it is implemented, but the interface it is required to have. (Where 'interface' includes semantics) The principal task of this effort is _not_ implementation but standardisation.

The parsed information could then be stored in a _sysconfig module which subsequent invocations then use which is close to what Greg proposed except that the first run is not necessarily done by the installation Makefile.

Yes. And there are number of approaches, some to be used before the module is distributed as standard, and some after. We need to know we _can_ implement it, and we need some actual implementations to examine, but this is not as important as standardising the API. What we need to produce is a specification, not (just) an implementation. And I come back again to the point that what the client needs is a module that actually compiles C code to a dynamically loadable shared library, so that the supplier can provide the C code _without_ any configuration stuff. Getting the compiler flags, etc, is all very well, but it isn't what is required by the end user. The person who needs all these flags is probably the supplier .. when the client complains the code doesn't compile. So it is important that the detail data be portable (i.e. can be physically sent across the internet). In my opinion, what is important is the API: the actual function signatures used to compile C code. Not how they're implemented. ------------------------------------------------------- John Skaller email: skaller@maxtal.com.au http://www.maxtal.com.au/~skaller phone: 61-2-96600850 snail: 10/1 Toxteth Rd, Glebe NSW 2037, Australia