[Distutils] buildout and zc.recipe.egg:custom problems

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

I'm trying to induce zc.buildout's zc.recipe.egg:custom recipe to build 
a library (lxml) against C libraries (libxml2, libxslt) installed in a 
custom place, i.e. as parts, such as parts/libxml2/include and 
parts/libxml2/lib.

I thought I had that working before and even blogged about it, but it 
turns out that something's not entirely right yet.

Right now I'm struggling to actually see an 'include-dirs' directive to 
have any effect on what's passed along to the C-compiler (namely the -I) 
option. It doesn't. After some research I think I've figured out why. 
I've installed lxml as a development egg, and somehow it always gets 
built the default way. The custom egg's install code is reached, but 
only when it's too late and lxml is already built. Therefore any special 
options such as include-dirs and library-dirs are never passed, as lxml 
has already been created.

I figure lxml gets created automatically and not through the custom 
recipe as I have it listed as a develop egg in the [buildout] section.

What to do about this?

Regards,

Martijn