[Distutils] moving things forward

[Greg Ewing]

Chris Barker wrote:
> But I think there is consensus here that build systems need to be 
> customisable -- which means arbitrary code may have to be run.

I think different people are using the word "build" in
different ways here.

To my mind, "building" is what the developer of a package
does, and a "build system" is what he uses to do it. I
don't care how much arbitrary code gets run during that
process.

But when I do "python setup.py install" or "pip install"
or whatever the recommended way is going to be, from my
point of view I'm not "building" the package, I'm
*installing* it.

Confusion arises because the process of installation may
require running a C compiler to generate extension modules.
But figuring out how to do that shouldn't require
running arbitrary code supplied by the developer. All the
tricky stuff should have been done before the package
was released.

If it's having trouble finding some library or header
file or whatever on my system, I'd much rather have a
nice, clear declarative config file that I can edit to
tell it where to find them, than some overly clever
piece of python code that's great when it works but
a pain to unravel when it doesn't.

-- 
Greg