[Distutils] New snapshot available

[Greg Ward]

Hi all --

not ready for release 0.11 yet, but I just added some nice touches to
the command-line syntax and semantics.  In addition to the "classic"
(already!)

  setup.py -nv build install

you can now do things like this:

  setup.py -nv build -q install

(build quietly, install verbosely)

Also, I added a new global option '--force', which means to skip the
lame dependency analysis that various bits of the Distutils do.  This is
necessary precisely because the dependency analysis is lame and will
miss many things that might require a rebuild (at least when building C
extensions).  Thus you have the option to skip the lame dependency
checking and rebuild everything.  Yeah, sure, I'd *love* to reimplement
"make" and "makedepend" in Python and thrown 'em into the Distutils, but
this is an acceptable workaround.

And of course you can use the lame dependency checking for some
commands, and force rebuilds for others.  Eg. simple timestamp checking
is just fine for the 'build_py' command, but you might not trust it for
'build_ext' (eg. if you've been editing header files, which are not
included in the dependency checking -- hey, I said it's lame!):

  setup.py -v build_py build_ext -f

Hope this seems useful.

If you want to try it, just get the latest from CVS, or download the
snapshot from:

    http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/implementation.html

And no, I haven't gotten to the bottom of what's going wrong with
installing on Windows.  Thanks for the bug reports -- I'll play around
with it tomorrow at work.

Enjoy!
        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                    gward@cnri.reston.va.us
Corporation for National Research Initiatives    
1895 Preston White Drive                           voice: +1-703-620-8990
Reston, Virginia, USA  20191-5434                    fax: +1-703-620-0913