[Distutils] Is build an inherently arbitrary-code process?

[Donald Stufft]

On Mar 27, 2014, at 3:42 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

> I became convinced that build was an inherently arbitrary-code
> process, and not something to be universally handled by a declarative
> system, when I observed an autotools project under configuration. The
> things spend ten minutes writing and compiling snippets of C code to
> determine which features are and are not supported by the runtime.
> This is *very* arbitrary code and probably one of the tamer things
> people like to do during builds.
> 
> As usual I blame distutils, because the separation is not there. So
> when you blame setup.py for having to run procedural code to generate
> the *metadata* you might go to far and think you should also eliminate
> a procedural build - simply because build and metadata are not
> adequately separate in the distutils design. Declarative build systems
> are a nice idea but they are not going to work for everyone.
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig

Well for the record auto tools does all of that because there’s near
zero ability to introspect the compiler to figure out what it supports
except by compiling little programs that depend on X feature and
then running them to see if they work or not.

That being said, yes building code is inherently a process that needs
to execute things and cannot be made completely static. I believe
the metadata itself can be static, and instead of an arbitrary build
script we can declare a build hook, but that’s an argument for a PEP!

I do believe a declarative build system can work for the 90% case
though and should probably be the “default” option.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20140327/d2bfcb9c/attachment.sig>