[Distutils] Fwd: distutil command lines

[Michiel Jan Laurens de Hoon]

Most of the configuration machinery is already available in distutils 
(via "python setup.py config"), so you may not need to run 
autoconf/configure at all. In one of my software projects, I was able to 
get rid of the autoconf/configure stuff altogether by using the 
corresponding distutils routines. These are much easier to use than 
autoconf/configure, and also guarantees that you are using the same 
compiler and compiler options for the config stage and the build stage. 
For some examples of "python setup.py config" (including finding 
external libraries and such), see

http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon/software/python/pygist.html

or

http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon/software/python/statistics.html

One caveat: there were some bugs in distutils' config machinery in 
Python 2.2. These have been fixed in Python 2.3.

--Michiel.

Brandon Long wrote:
> I mailed this to Greg, and he said to try here:
> 
> I've got a project with a python wrapper/extension module (amoung
> others), called ClearSilver http://www.clearsilver.net/
> 
> The package uses autoconf/configure to determine which programs are
> available, and how to build things, etc.  This includes external
> libaries and locations for them, like -lz, -ldb, etc.
> 
> Until recently, I've been just providing a Makefile for compiling the
> python extension, instead of using distutils.  I don't really want to
> deal with compiling the shared library on all of the platforms, though,
> so I figured I'd go and create the setup.py script.
> 
> The trouble is, how to pass the information from configure to the
> setup.py.  I was just going to pass them on the command line, ie from
> Makefile:
>   
>   $(PYTHON) setup.py ext_build $(INCLUDES) $(LIBDIRS) $(LIBS)
> 
> where $(INCLUDES) is a list of -Ipaths and $(LIBDIRS) is a list of
> -Lpaths and $(LIBS) is a list of -llibraries.
> 
> Unfortunately, the command-line processing code, and the code for the
> setup.cfg file, seems to take the command line arguments and put them
> into a dictionary.  Later, that dictionary is used to set the attributes
> of the ext_build class, which then translates the string into a single
> item list.
> 
> So, this means I can't specify more than one option on the command line
> and get a list of libraries or paths.  In fact, there seems to be no way
> to set a list on an option via the command line.  That seems bad.  Most
> people seem to deal with this problem by having as much smarts in the
> setup.py file as there are in their configure script... which seems
> annoying, especially since if there are similar macros for finding
> libraries and the like in distutils, they are at least not documented.
> 
> Its also not clear to me how I can parse the command line arguments in
> setup.py... though I guess I could probably just import sys, run through
> sys.argv removing my arguments, or some such.  I didn't try that,
> though.  Instead, my "solution" is to parse the Makefile from the
> setup.py file, and setup the options from what I get.  Obviously I can't
> write all of make, but it works well enough for my task (its not up
> there yet, it'll be in the next version).
> 
> Any thoughts on fixing the command line arguments to support list
> options?
> 
> Brandon

-- 
Michiel de Hoon, Assistant Professor
University of Tokyo, Institute of Medical Science
Human Genome Center
4-6-1 Shirokane-dai, Minato-ku
Tokyo 108-8639
Japan
http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon