14 Jun
2002
14 Jun
'02
1:09 p.m.
The question is whether we want distutils to be a development tool as well, or rather stick to its main purpose: that of simplifying distribution and installation of software (and thanks to Greg, it's great at that !).
Yes. Much of distutils is concerned with compiling, and that part is also needed by a development tool. So I'd say it's a pretty good match. You have to specify the extension build rules as some kind of script. We found Modules/Setup + makesetup inadequate, and moved to setup.py + distutils. Distutils is the best we got; it knows about many compilers and platforms; it was pretty easy to add .h file dependency handling (though not discovery). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)