[Python-Dev] Proposal -- makefile patches and scripts to generate python RPMs

[Andrew Kuchling]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 05:00:12PM +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>distutils is not useful for installing Python (it needs Python
>to start with), ...

Note that the Distutils doesn't need many C-based modules: _sre,
posix, and string are about it.  So those modules could be
automatically compiled into the Python binary (perhaps being moved
from Modules/ into Python/ to signify their new importance) and the
resulting binary should have enough marbles to run a setup.py script
that would build everything else in Modules/.  

The downside is that you could no longer compile those 3 modules as
dynamically loadable, but the upside is that the setup.py could be
smarter about detecting which libraries are available on the system,
and compiling everything which can be.  This would, one hopes, make
Setup file hacking a thing of the past...

--amk