[Distutils] Questions about distutils strategy

[James C. Ahlstrom]

Tim Peters wrote:

> It is.  The DevStudio debugger doesn't care how an .exe got built (provided
> you passed the compiler the right switches to get debug info generated).
> The main Windows project I work on is built by a hand-written makefile run
> by a homegrown Win32 variant of GNU make; DevStudio plays no role in it
> unless & until I want to run under the debugger.  Goodness, you can even use
> the DevStudio Build -> Start Debug -> Attach to Process ... menu item to
> start debugging an arbitrary process already running on the system, source
> code or not, originally in a DevStudio language or not.

Very interesting.  I didn't know that.  Probably neither
does the average Windows developer.

> If it wasn't
> compiled with MS-style symbol info, though, you can't do much more than step
> thru the machine code.

Ooops, not at all what people will want.

> Notwithstanding, many hardcore Windows weenies *prefer* doing development
> under DevStudio.  But I'd say that's a topic for the DevUtils SIG <wink>.

I think we may be kidding ourselves.  It is not a matter of "prefer".
Distutils is not at all compatible with DevStudio.  Suppose you add
a file to the project in DevStudio.  You will have to make the parallel
change by hand in Distutils.  People use (or should use) _ASSERT(), so
there must be Debug and Release versions no matter if the debugger is
used or not.  Built in to DevStudio, a file edit (at best) in Distutils.
And to top it off, you need on-line documentation for Windows anyway,
so you need DevStudio or equivalant even if you do learn Distutils.

People in PythonDev[:] may put up with this, but if we go to
main-stream Windows developers and say "do this our way" they
will say "no thanks".

Distutils makes sense on Unix where things are done with
makefiles.  Why do we even care if Windows developers make
Python extensions in DevStudio?

Jim Ahlstrom