[Distutils] Random bits

[Greg Ward]

On 02 December 1999, Fred L. Drake, Jr. said:
> 
> Michael Hudson writes:
>  > Further mucking about shows that
> [Lots of examples of busted behavior elided...]
> 
>   I tihnk this really shows that many of these things really need to
> be global options and that the local options thing makes very little
> sense.

I beg to differ -- I'll have to take a closer look at what's going on
with Michael's examples of brokenness, but I like to think they can be
fixed without completely tossing the existing design.

See "perldoc ExtUtils::MakeMaker" for my rationale behind having most
behaviour controlled by command options.  22 pages of documentation
describing all of MakeMaker's options (which are all global) is a bit
overwhelming; I wanted to be able to categorize things a bit.

[Michael again]
> Would it be reasonable to have an "interactive" mode, or am I just being
> silly again?

Interesting notion.  Would this just be a shell for the Distutils
commands, eg.

   ./setup.py --interactive
   > build
   [...output of 'build' command...]
   > install
   [...output of 'install' command...]
   > quit

or did you have something else in mind?

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                    gward@cnri.reston.va.us
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