[Distutils] Packaging: bdist_deb patches / platform specific code

[David Cournapeau]

David Lyon wrote:
>
> Not true...
>
> Don't forget, cygwin runs under windows

And how does that help to build a linux binary ?

> , and wine runs under linux
>   

Yes, but Visual Studio does not. So you are out of luck if you need full
compatibility with pre-built python binaries on python.org. It works
almost ok with mingw, but not always - and it is far from working well
on windows 64 bits BTW.

Anyway, as long as distutils works under windows, distutils will work
under wine - the problem is the toolchain, not distutils.

> Cross compiling has been common practice for the last 30 years.
>   

And still hard to get right. That should certainly not be built in
distutils - a sane build tool needs very little knowledge about cross
compilation, really. Python itself cannot be cross-compiled out of the
box anyway.

> At a minimum, distutils should be able to create an .egg that will
> work on every system.
>   

Before implementing things that no other system has ever done, we should
focus on basic things that distutils cannot do today and are expected
from a build/distribution tool.

Those are hard problems to get right, saying that it is not hard because
it is just moving files and scripts does not really help. That's like
saying programming is easy because it is just inputting characters in a
text file.

cheers,

David