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

[Donald Stufft]

On Mar 27, 2014, at 4:19 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 27 March 2014 19:48, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> I do believe a declarative build system can work for the 90% case
>> though and should probably be the "default" option.
> 
> +1. Easy things should be easy, and hard things possible. Ultimately,
> I want to say "this is my project, here are the Python files. And oh,
> here's a couple of C files, nothing clever here, move along.
> 
> When I interface with an external library that may not be in the same
> place on every system, I'd expect to say a bit more, but mainly just
> "look in location X, but the user can override this with a command
> line argument”.

That’s the job of the linker, it has built in locations to look for libraries
and env vars/command line flags to override that. Someone packaging
a C-ext that needs a library to compile shouldn’t be specifying where
to find it anyways.

> 
> Going beyond that - autodetecting library locations, languages other
> than C (for example Cython), detecting CPU capabilities, etc - I would
> expect to be able to do it if I needed to, but I would not expect the
> declarative framework to be catering for those cases, I'd assume I
> needed to write code.
> 
> Paul


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

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