[Distutils] Any volunteers for Distutils maintainer?

[Mark W. Alexander]

On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

> Konrad Hinsen wrote:
> > 
> > > Oh, I do think that distutils needs to move on. Inparticular it
> > > needs support for more native OS packaging tools. We'll look
> > > into these after the 2.2 feature freeze.
> > 
> > My pet peeve is missing support for compiler optimization levels.
> > This is what still makes me hesitate to fully switch to distutils,
> > one of my modules runs at half speed when compiled under distutils
> > supervision, and I see no way to change that.
> 
> Right; I'm currently using a gross hack to enable setting the
> compiler options (see mxSetup.py in my distutils packages). It
> would be nice if a packager could define the options in a more
> flexible way, e.g. by setting an option.

Here's another crazy idea. How about adding cross-compiling support?
I'm thinking in terms of the catalog-sig. If we could get a catalog
server housing distutils packages, the catalog server could generate
binary packages for any supported platform, regardless of what
platform it was running. Authors could just upload their source and
the rest would be magic.

I have done enough cross-platform development to be dangerous, but I
think all distutils would have to support is a --target option and
some sanity checking to see if the appropriate tools exist on the
compiling machine.

Comments?

mwa