[Baypiggies] Installing C extensions with pip - verbosity

[Ian Zimmerman]

I have for years successfully resisted the distutils -> setuptools ->
pip madness, but I'm just about to give up.  There's just one last
show-stopping hurdle before I taste the full benefits (cough) of pip.

When installing packages with C extensions the old way (ie. running
setup.py in the unpacked source tree), I could see the build gory
details, cc and ld commands and all.  I liked that.

Now with pip, of course the first thing is it wants to install a wheel.
NO NO!  I want to build from source!  And in the online pip docs [1], I
couldn't find way to directly prevent pip from using a wheel.  Is there
a way?  Luckily I found a sneaky way - by passing an --install-option=-v
appendage to the requirement string.

However, even with this verbose flag, and _even if I repeat it_, pip
won't show me the actual compile commands.  It just shows some lame
progress indicators and twirling slashes.  So how can I see what it is
doing?  Is there a logfile somewhere?  What if there's an error, how can
I help myself without that information?

Help an old-timer step into the new century - 17 years too late :)

[1]
https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/pip_install/

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