[Distutils] Proposal: "Install and save"

[Philippe Ombredanne]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2016, 17:04, Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> As I understand it, in the Javascript world package.json is used in
> both
> cases. Is that something Python should try to emulate? Is it hard to
> achieve given the limitations of setup.py that you pointed out?

Thomas:
this is not entirely correct: a node package with native code needs to have
node-gyp [1] installed which in turns relies on the gyp-based Python tool ;)
to actually build the natives using actual makefile-like build scripts.
MO is that any kind of mildly engaged package build for NPM requires a rather
more involved effort than its Python world equivalent. And you can see
the JS packaging world walking somewhat of the same path that has
walked here before.
To get some feeling of what they are going through read this thread [2]


On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 10:11 AM Alex Grönholm <alex.gronholm at nextday.fi> wrote:
> This topic has been beaten to death. There is no way to cram the
> complexities of C extension compilation setup into purely declarative
> metadata. Distutils2 tried and failed. Just look at the setup.py files
> of some popular projects and imagine all that logic expressed in
> declarative metadata.

Indeed!
There is no magic and no free lunch there.

 [1] https://github.com/nodejs/node-gyp
 [2] https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/1891

-- 
Cordially
Philippe Ombredanne