[Distutils] Optional C extensions in packages

[Ian Bicking]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> I'm thinking setuptools should allow you to specify that one or more C 
> extensions in a project are optional.
> 
> At minimum, there would then be a command-line option you could give to 
> easy_install to say, "don't build any optional extensions", so if you don't 
> have a compiler or need a cross-platform egg, you can skip those extensions.
> 
> There would also need to be a way to specify this when using the regular 
> build commands.
> 
> This feature would address projects that include optional C versions of 
> certain code, that can fall back to pure Python implementations.

I don't have anything I maintain that falls under this, but I've had a 
hard time supporting dependencies which do have this problem (Cheetah in 
particular).  It would be quite handy to have this.  And actually my 
experience with Cheetah would make me reluctant to introduce a 
zope.interfaces requirement for all the same reasons -- even if I'm 
willing to get degraded performance, that's not an option I have (which 
in many cases is quite acceptable, as it would be for the way I use 
Cheetah).


-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org