Jim Fulton wrote:

Martijn Faassen wrote:

...

Hi there,

I'm trying to induce zc.buildout's zc.recipe.egg:custom recipe to build a library (lxml) against C libraries (libxml2, libxslt) installed in a custom place, i.e. as parts, such as parts/libxml2/include and parts/libxml2/lib.

I thought I had that working before and even blogged about it, but it turns out that something's not entirely right yet.

Right now I'm struggling to actually see an 'include-dirs' directive to have any effect on what's passed along to the C-compiler (namely the -I) option. It doesn't. After some research I think I've figured out why. I've installed lxml as a development egg, and somehow it always gets built the default way. The custom egg's install code is reached, but only when it's too late and lxml is already built. Therefore any special options such as include-dirs and library-dirs are never passed, as lxml has already been created.

I figure lxml gets created automatically and not through the custom recipe as I have it listed as a develop egg in the [buildout] section.

What to do about this?

Unfortunately, you've hit a limitation in buildout and the custom recipe. This limitation will, eventually, be removed. When creating develop eggs, you have no control over build options. When creating custom eggs, you have no way to use directories as source, and besides, you really want a develop egg.

I think what we want is a develop recipe that lets you specify various options when creating develop eggs. I'll look at writing this over the next few days.

I still haven't finished this, but while working on it I realized that I should have suggested a work around. You can create a setup.cfg file in the directory containing your library setup.py file. This ConfigParser-style configuration file should have a build_ext section containing the options you want:

[build_ext] include-dirs = /foo/include

This is actually what the develop recipe will do behind the scenes.

Jim