On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 11:55 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Erik,

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Erik Bray <erik.m.bray@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hi all, This is my first post specifically to distutils-sig, though I've had an interest in packaging for a while (having come up with some fairly arcane schemes in the past, where no better alternatives were apparent).

At any rate: I'm currently working on a plan to overhaul how a number of my company's projects are packaged and distributed.  Right now they all rely on a monkey-patched, hacked up distutils that needs to go away.  I'm already on top of that.

But seeing as how distutils2 is going to be the "new hotness" I want to plan for at as part of my overhaul.  I realize that distutils2 is still in flux, and anything I do now will have to be tweaked as development on it continues.  I am fine with this, as I still intend to use Distribute as the primary installation mechanism.  But I really like how distutils2 keeps all metadata in the setup.cfg file, and want to start doing that now, so that I don't have to keep two copies of everything.

It should be no problem to just have my setup.py read everything it needs out of setup.cfg, but what I'm wondering is if there is already an extension to do this, or will I have to roll my own?  It just seems like an obvious thing to have for transitioning to distutils2, and if it doesn't already exist it should (I will of course be happy to contribute).  I should note that I don't want distutils2 itself to be a dependency for installing my packages, as it is too unstable, so directly using any machinery built into it is out of the question.

There's such a thing, look at this function here:

http://hg.python.org/distutils2/file/6fca65ff60ad/distutils2/util.py#l1098

It's not hooked yet to a command-line tool like mkcfg, but should be soon.

Let us know how it works out for you.

I accidentally replied to this the other day directly to Tarek instead of to the list. At any rate, the cfg_to_args() function there is mostly working out, after a couple bug fixes (see http://bugs.python.org/issue11595). I also have another patch in my local repository that adds support for the package_data options. But now I'm stuck wondering what the plan is for extension modules. Different versiions of the documentation, such that it exists, say different things. Looking at the source code it looks like right now each extension module is configured in a section called [extension=<module_name>], but I wonder how likely that is to change. Furthermore, I have many extension modules that use NumPy. Typically, when building an extension with NumPy, one gets the path to the NumPy includes using numpy.get_includes(). But of course, there's no way to do this in setup.cfg. Right now the only solution I can think of is to add a setup_hook. Anyways, worse comes to worse I'll build my extension modules in setup.py only for now, but I'm just wondering if there's a decided upon plan for extension modules in distutils2 yet. Thanks, Erik