Robin Becker wrote:

In article <3B03EF8A.93043D9D@lemburg.com>, M.-A. Lemburg writes

...

I was just wondering whether anybody has already tackled the job of using distutils to build external libs. I am thinking of the following setup here:

* you have a source tree in ./libsrc * building the lib is done in the usual Unix way: cd ./libsrc; ./configure; make * now copy te resulting .a or .so to your Python package target build dir * continue with the normal distutils procedure to build the Python wrapper

Is this possible in a fairly portable way (at least with respect to Unix platforms) ?

well I have used the standard lib building scheme, but that doesn't involve the configure make framework. All the flags were set in setup.py. Which is why the AIX build of my bitmap renderer went wrong; ie it didn't know about endianness which is presumably something that the configure script would normally figure out.

Right... I think we really need to get distutils to know about the standard Unix autoconf-based build process in order to include building external libs right along with the Python extensions. I'm currently looking at having iODBC built directly by the mxODBC setup -- this would allow shipping a single archive for the whole machinery and greatly simplify the installation process. This is also a prerequisite for auto-building in a CPAN like way. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH ______________________________________________________________________ Company & Consulting: http://www.egenix.com/ Python Software: http://www.lemburg.com/python/