[Distutils] Responses to proposal

[Fred L. Drake]

Martijn Faassen writes:
 > Perhaps we can distribute 'external package info files' for common
 > external packages, describing how this package works on various
 > platforms (where the files are, what they're called, how to link to

  This is interesting.  It sounds like we can go a long with something 
like this.  It is interesting to note that gtk+ installs a script
"gtk-config" that allows other makefiles to use something like:

	CFLAGS=`gtk-config --cflags`
	LDFLAGS=`gtk-config --libs`

  This is probably not the right approach for most packages, but it's
worth being aware of.  Perhaps we could supply (possibly as part of
distutils) a script py-config that takes essentially the same
arguments as gtk-config, but also a --package to specify what package
we're actually interested in, or require a positional parameter that
specifies the package:

	py-config --package zlib --version
	- or -
	py-config --version zlib

  Maintaining a sufficiently large collection of package info files
may be difficult, but it's hard to tell.  It may be feasible to use
native package management databases on systems that use them;
something like RPM may provide enough information, but I don't know
enough about SysVR4 PKG system yet.

 > information file once for each external resource. In the end the writers
 > of libraries may start making these info files by themselves. :)

  Ideally, installed on package installation.

 > And I think options file versus command line options warrants some more
 > discussion, too. Not a whole flamewar, but I wouldn't like to settle on
 > a vast slew of command line options if a nicely commented options file

  I don't see any reason both can't be used.  Command line options
could be used to override the options file if necessary.  This may
point to a stronger approach than getopt to the option parsing issue.


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.	     <fdrake@acm.org>
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
1895 Preston White Dr.	    Reston, VA  20191