On Thursday, June 13, 2002, at 07:49 , Skip Montanaro wrote:
I wonder if it would be better to have distutils generate the appropriate type of makefile and execute that instead of directly building objects and shared libraries. This would finesse some of the dependency tracking problems that pop up frequently.
+1 Distutils is very unix-centric in that it expects there to be separate compile and link steps. While this can be made to work on Windows (at least for MSVC) where there are such separate compilers if you look hard enough it can't be made to work for MetroWerks on the Mac, and also for MSVC it's a rather funny way to do things. I would much prefer it if distutils would (optionally) gather all it's knowledge and generate a Makefile or an MW projectfile or an MSVC projectfile. For MW distutils already does this (every step simply remembers information, and at the "link" step it writes out a project file and builds that) but it would be nice if this way of operation was codified. Note that for people having an IDE this would also make debugging a lot easier: if you have an IDE project you can easily do nifty things like turn on debugging, use its class browser, etc. -- - Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com> http://www.cwi.nl/~jack - - If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman -