[Distutils] People want CPAN :-)

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:22 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
[..]
> To get to one real specific problem, let's consider build_src. build_src is
> a new subcommand in numpy.distutils that builds C extension sources from
> other files. We use this to hook in f2py's wrapper generator and other more
> ad hoc forms of generating wrappers. When build_ext uses --inplace, we need
> build_src to use --inplace, too, because it will often output some "final"
> products in addition to intermediate wrapper sources. In order to integrate
> this with setuptools' develop command (which invokes build_ext --inplace but
> not build_src --inplace because setuptools knows nothing about
> numpy.distutils), we need to create a subclass of setuptool's develop
> command that will reinitialize build_src with the appropriate option. Then
> we need to conditionally place the develop command into the set of command
> classes so as not to introduce a setuptools dependency on those people who
> don't want to use it.
>
> This is nuts.

This clearly indicates that we should be able to extend build_ext
behaviour without subclassing it.
And having the ability to drive a specific compiling from within an
Extension subclass can solve this issue.


> numpy.distutils shouldn't have to know anything about
> setuptools to accomplish this if the framework were properly designed. And
> this doesn't even get into the fact that many of the numpy.distutils command
> classes that are shared with setuptools are conditional subclasses and
> probably still buggily cobbled together.

Same goes with "install", and I've proposed in the past the ability to
run arbitrary commands as pre/post hooks for it.
So we can "configure" this command instead of replacing it.