[Distutils] People want CPAN

[David Cournapeau]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 8:47 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I am not sure to follow here: let's forget about your example where
> you call build_src and install together.
>
> -> in the real world, how a --prefix passed to install is going to
> impact a build command and vice-versa ?

In many cases. I gave the rpath example, but there is also the
pkg-config-like files generation example, etc... It is not possible to
foresee usage of this in a build tool, any sufficiently complex
project will need to share those options, and different ones depending
on the tool. I think it is a uncontroversial design decision followed
by almost every build tool.


> So, if you are not *installing*, it doesn't make sense to call the
> *install* command, and build could
> have its --prefix option in your case.

I don't *want* to call the install command, but I want to know the
prefix option of install. I do not want a build specific prefix
option, I want to know the global install option, whatever the user
command lines are.

prefix is only an example - as I mentioned in my previous email, I
potentially need every option of install in build command.

> $ python setup.py --prefix=foo cmd1 cmd1 etc
>
> and the result would be in Distribution.options = {'path1': xxx, 'path2': xx}

This is a major change in distutils behavior, so we need to solve the
following issues:
 - every user will have to change how to call distutils
 - what happens if people still use python setup.py install
--option1=foo instead of python setup.py --prefix=option1 install

cheers,

David