[Distutils] waf can be used to compile Python extension modules

[Paul Moore]

On 22 March 2014 22:37, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> 1. Formally decouple the setup.py CLI from the distutils command system
>
> Agreed - it looks like a compatible CLI needs to be part of the transition
> to any new system (I assume that's what you meant).

Does this statement mean "document the exact setup.py invocations
which need to be supported by any tool" or does it mean "create a new
standard cli and update pip to use it and sort out a means of wrapping
existing setup.py scripts to expose it"? If the former, then I've
informally done that earlier in the thread (basically "setup.py
bdist_wheel -d XXX" is it[1], if we assume that by the time it's
official pip will have completed the move to installing from sdist by
using wheels as an intermediate step). Writing a wrapper setup.py that
simply invokes a different tool such as bento is trivial.

Paul

[1] The one exception is editable installations (setup.py develop).
That's supported by pip, implemented wholly in setuptools, and an
integral part of many workflows. I don't believe anyone has looked yet
at what might be needed to decouple that from the
distutils/setuptools/setup.py infrastructure.