[Distutils] updated SF patch

[Pearu Peterson]

On Tue, 4 Jun 2002, Jeremy Hylton wrote:

> >>>>> "AMK" == Andrew Kuchling <akuchlin@mems-exchange.org> writes:
> 
>   AMK> On Fri, May 31, 2002 at 01:43:24PM -0400, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
>   >> Good point.  Is the core API documented anywhere?  I can't tell
>   >> what is intended to be part of the API and what is accidentally
>   >> exposed by the implementation.
> 
>   AMK> No reference docs were ever written, AFAIK, so we'll just have
>   AMK> to follow Python convention: methods prefixed with an
>   AMK> underscore are private, otherwise public.
> 
> I'm wondering more about the goal of preserving backwards
> compatibility of an undocumented interface for extension writers.  How
> many extensions have been written?  Do we have any idea how many
> people use this or would be affected?
> 
> If it's just a handful of people, I wonder if it would be easier to
> trying to define a small API that they can rely on and give up on
> backwards compatibility.

For your information, the module scipy_distutils from the SciPy
(www.scipy.org) package extends distutils quite a bit: it provides
definitions for a dozen of Fortran 77/90/95 compilers from different
vendors, it supports compilation of Fortran sources and building
(automatically generated) extension modules to wrap Fortran and C
libraries, etc.
To achieve all that many hooks from the standard distutils needed to be
extended and I cannot imagine if all that could have be done using just a
"small" API (whatever that would be).

However, I don't know what kind of changes are you planning and
therefore I am not sure if they would have any impact to
scipy_distutils. Hopefully it will be positive in the sense that it would
work with Python versions starting from 2.1 and ending with the
latest. So, some backwards compatibility is appreciated.

What is the definition of handful people? Do you count extension
developers or the users of these extensions? If the later, one would
really need lots of hands when considering the current user base of SciPy
alone (to give some idea, currently there are more than 100 subscribers
to the scipy users mailing list formed in less than one year).

Regards,
	Pearu