[Distutils] Specifying a dependency for rebuilding an extension?

[Thomas Heller]

Rene Liebscher wrote:
> Mike Fletcher wrote:
> > 
> > I've just noticed that with PyOpenGL, changing a source file that's included
> > by the "declared" source file for an extension doesn't cause the
> > recompilation of the extension.
> > 
> > i.e.
> >         _openglmodule.c
> >         _opengl_nummodule.c # includes _openglmodule.c
> > 
> > The extension only declares _opengl_nummodule.c as a source file.  Is there
> > some way to declare that the "rule" for the extension should trigger if the
> > given file has changed?
> 
> AFAIK there is no way to do so.
Correct.

> But I think it would be easy to add it to distutils.
This of course means that it is also easy to add it to the setup-script,
since you can override the distutils commands with your own.
class my_build_ext(distutils.command.build_ext):
      ...

setup(...
      cmdclass = {'build_ext': my_build_ext},
      ...)

> 
> First we need to extend the Extension class to hold the names
> of files on which the extension depends.
> (This would mean included c-files, header-files ...)
> 
> It could look like this:
> Extension(
> sources=["foo.c"], 
> depends_on=["config.h","bar.c"], 
> ...
> )
> or for Mike's example
> Extension(
> sources=["_opengl_nummodule.c"], 
> depends_on=["_openglmodule.c"], 
> ...
> )
IMO better would be to let sources be instances of a SourceFile
class, which would depend on other (Source)files.

Thomas