[Distutils] The build_ext command has -I and -L options, why don't others???

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Sat Jul 21 15:12:00 2001


Paul Moore wrote:
> 
> I think this may be a fundamental flaw in the way distutils works... (By that, I
> mean that it's something that "obviously" should work, but it's going to be
> massively hard to implement that way :-() Let me know what you think.
> 
> I'm still hacking on my PIL setup.py file. My latest thought was that, given
> that PIL needs the ZLib, JPEG and TCL libraries, and given that I don't have a
> "standard" location to look in for them, what command line options might help.
> 
> And sure enough, I found the -I and -L options for the build_ext command.
> 
> Great! That's just what I want. Obviously (!), I'm using the "build" command,
> but that executed build_ext behind the scenes for my extensions, so I'll just
> pass -I and -L, and let build pass them on to build_ext as needed.
> 
> Oh, no... The build command complains that the -I and -L options are invalid.
> Grr. I guess this means that I either have to run build_ext first, by hand, and
> then run build (this works - well, it would if the build_clib command had an -I
> option, but that's a separate issue...), or I have to write a custom build
> command which accepts -I and -L and passes them onto build_ext.
> 
> Surely, commands (like build and install) which run other commands should take
> *all* of the options allowed by any of their sub-commands, and pass them onto
> those sub-commands. As I say, this seems obvious to me, but (having looked
> briefly at the internals) annoyingly hard to do, in practice.

python build_ext -I ... -L ... build

should do the trick.
 
> PS I think this pretty much kills any hope of writing a setup.py which usefully
> implements command line argument extensions. You'd have to write custom commands
> for every command, from the lowest one which needs the extra option, all the way
> up the tree (install must be customised to take the same options as the custom
> build, which must be customised to take the same options as the custom
> build_ext, ...)

AFAIK, all commands inherit command line option from the Distribution
class, so by subclassing you should be able to provide those extra
options to all subcommands. Could be wrong though... the option passing
in distutils is something of a mess.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
______________________________________________________________________
Consulting & Company:                           http://www.egenix.com/
Python Software:                        http://www.lemburg.com/python/