[Distutils] Proposed new Distutils API for compiler flagdetection (Issue26689)

[Nick Coghlan]

On 29 August 2016 at 01:44, Sylvain Corlay <sylvain.corlay at gmail.com> wrote:
> Regarding compatibility, I have been using this on a variety of platforms
> and compilers for some time already.
>
> I think that monkey-patching distutils.ccompiler from setuptools is a dirty
> solution and should only be provided as a patch for earlier versions of
> python. At the moment, setuptools does little on ccompiler except for a
> specific msvc patch regarding locating msvcvarsall.bat.
>
> I understand that it is not a concern with C, but this feature becomes
> crucial when building extensions with C++ since new flavors of the language
> are emerging every couple of years now. It becomes important to be able to
> check and output meaningful error messages when the compiler does not
> support C++[11/14/17] features if they are needed for an extension.

+1 from me - we don't have compiler version requirements in
declarative metadata (and are highly unlikely to ever do so), so it
makes sense to make it as easy as possible for extension module
authors to make their build scripts fail at least somewhat gracefully.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia