Robin Becker wrote:

Just v.R has been having some problems compiling a particular library that needed libart. libart has a configuration script that should properly be invoked before building the library.

This should be possible by subclassing build_ext. I've been doing this in the eGenix mx Extensions (see mxSetup.py which comes with them) for doing autoconf work at build time. Works fine for me, but the tools are still somewhat limited -- nothing which a extra Python module couldn't solve though ;-)

Are there any plans to ease the invocation of such scripts or alternatively how to I determine in python things like endianness in size, short size long size etc etc. For all I know Darwin might run on both big and little endian machines so it's wrong to rely simply on the platform for this sort of thing.

The sys module has recently grown a few attributes which let you query the endianess. My platform.py also provides you with a lot of interesting information in that area.

If you want to use Python 1.5.2, I think the best solution is by using the struct module and testing the resulting string data for size and position of the various bits.