[Python-Dev] cross-compiling

[Jeremy Hylton]

On 11/7/05, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> About using distutils to build the extensions, this is because some
> extensions require quite a bit of logic to determine the build
> commands (e.g. look at BSDDB or Tkinter). There was a pre-distutils
> way of building extensions using Modules/Setup* but this required
> extensive manual editing if tools weren't in the place where they were
> expected, and they never were.

I think part of the problem is that setup.py has a bunch of heuristics
that are intended to do the right thing without user intervention. 
If, on the other hand, the user wants to intervene, because "the right
thing" is wrong for cross-compiling, you are kind of stuck.  I don't
think there is an obvious way to select the extension modules to build
and the C libraries for them to link against.

Jeremy