[Distutils] distutils extension and setuptools

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 01:29 PM 11/28/2006 +0100, Samuel Dufour wrote:
>Hi,
>
>We currently develop a software to integrate packages (C++/Python) in
>plant modeling. We use SCons to build C++ library and Boost.Python to
>create the wrappers. We have extended distutils to call scons rather
>than distutils.build_ext. Thus, we distribute packages with the
>distutils frontend (sdist, bdist_*).
>
>All python modules are installed in a common namespace (a meta-package).
>All libraries and data (shared libraries, headers, tests,...) are
>installed in a common directory on the system which is
>external to the python installation (e.g. /usr/local).
>
>We would like to use setuptools functionalities to manage dependencies
>between packages. Is it possible to extend setuptools as we extend
>distutils to deals correctly with external data ?

Setuptools doesn't support installation outside of a single location for 
libraries and a single location for scripts, and extending it to do so 
isn't really possible if you want your project to be easy_install-able 
(i.e. support dependencies or be depended upon).  At best, you could use 
--single-version-externally-managed to install a project with external 
data, but that option isn't compatible with easy_install.