[Distutils] (extension) module dependencies in setuptools

[Andrew Straw]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

> At 11:50 PM 1/23/2006 -0800, Andrew Straw wrote:
>
>> I would like to propose a feature for setuptools: runtime enforcement of
>> dependencies specified at build time by setup.py. I appreciate that
>> "pkg_resources.require('foo==1.0')" works, but this requires a tedious
>> update of version numbers in affected source files every time you
>> upgrade foo and rebuild the target package. I'm thinking, in particular,
>> of extension modules built on a particular version of another package
>> with its own C interface. Think matplotlib.backends._ns_backend_agg
>> depending on numpy.
>
>
> I'm getting close to starting on an overhaul of setuptools' 
> experimental shared library support to allow dynamic linking to 
> libraries included in a different egg than the one the extension is 
> in.  When I do that, there's definitely going to be some inter-egg 
> dependency checking of sorts, except it will be based on *exact* 
> version numbers, because it will be tied to the egg version you linked 
> against.
>
> I suppose it's possible I could do something similar for other sorts 
> of extensions, but it seems to me that the simple way to do 
> inter-extension API checks in Python today is to have a .h supplied by 
> one extension containing a version, and having a PyCObject you import 
> from the target extension with a function pointer that gets the built 
> version.  You then compare the API version you compiled against with 
> the API version present at runtime.  The source code doesn't change; 
> you're just verifying that the API version matches what you compiled 
> against.
>
> Notice that this doesn't require setuptools in order to be useful.  
> It's simply part of best practices for C extensions that provide a C 
> API for other extensions to use.  Python itself uses this technique as 
> well.


Absolutely. In fact, I just implemented exactly this in numpy. I was 
thinking, however, of the case of older extension modules which don't do 
this. I suppose I could submit patches there, too, but there are only so 
many hours in the day...

Anyhow, when you implement version checking for shared libraries, if it 
looks straightforward to implement it for other extensions, you have my 
vote for going ahead and adding it in...

Cheers!
Andrew