[Python-Dev] addressing distutils inability to track file dependencies

[Greg Ward]

On 14 June 2002, Fredrik Lundh said:
> alex wrote:
> 
> > The "problem" (:-) is that it's great at just building extensions, too.
> > 
> > python2.1 setup.py install, python2.2 setup.py install, python2.3 setup.py 
> > install, and hey pronto, I have my extension built and installed on all 
> > Python versions I want to support, ready for testing.  Hard to beat!-)
> 
> does your code always work right away?

If we're talking about a downloaded third party extension -- the main
use case for the Distutils -- one certainly hopes so!  It's only a happy
accident that the Distutils are moderately useful for
building/development.

> I tend to use an incremental approach, with lots of edit-compile-run
> cycles.  I still haven't found a way to get the damn thing to just build
> my extension and copy it to the current directory, so I can run the
> test scripts.

Last time I checked:

  python setup.py build_ext --inplace

> (distutils is also a pain to use with a version management system
> that marks files in the repository as read-only; distutils copy function
> happily copies all the status bits. but the remove function refuses to
> remove files that are read-only, even if the files have been created
> by distutils itself...)

Yeah, that's a stupid situation.  I'm sure there are "XXX" comments in 
the code where I ponder the wisdom of preserving mtime and mode.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - just another Python hacker                  gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/