[Distutils] something else to throw into the static metadata mix

[Chris Galvan]

Sridhar Ratnakumar wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:58:56 -0700, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> 
> wrote:
>
>> The other option could be to enable support for static linking so as 
>> to make the egg a reasonably self-sufficient binary (eg: lxml's 
>> --static flag to setup.py)
>> Just to throw more in the mix -- this option is totally ad hoc in 
>> lxml, which means it's hard to handle in an installer like 
>> easy_install or pip.  That is, there's no good way to do 
>> "easy_install --static lxml" (it's more possible in pip, but still 
>> quite awkward).
>
> Maybe we can standardize the ``--static`` flag for setup.py and 
> installers? The benefit of this is that builders and installers can 
> support a static build feature without having to hack build scripts 
> for specific packages (Currently PyPM's backend maintains custom code 
> for building such special packages).
>
> Examples of usage::
>
>   $ python setup.py build --static install
>   $ easy_install --static lxml
>   $ pip install --install-option="--static" pip

I like your thoughts here, but there currently isn't a way to 
distinguish between an egg that contains binaries that were linked 
statically vs. dynamically.  It seems like in that case we would need 
some distinguishing flag in an egg name to signify it was linked 
statically, and at that point it seems like we are trying to do too much.

Thoughts?

-Chris

>
> -srid
>