[Python-Dev] Evaluated cmake as an autoconf replacement

[David Cournapeau]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 2:24 AM, Heikki Toivonen
<htoivonen at spikesource.com> wrote:
> David Cournapeau wrote:
>> The hard (or rather time consuming) work is to do everything else that
>> distutils does related to the packaging. That's where scons/waf are
>> more interesting than cmake IMO, because you can "easily" give up this
>> task back to distutils, whereas it is inherently more difficult with
>> cmake.
>
> I think this was the first I heard about using SCons this way. Do you
> have any articles or examples of this? If not, could you perhaps write one?

I developed numscons as an experiment to build numpy, scipy, and other
complex python projects depending on many library/compilers:

http://github.com/cournape/numscons/tree/master

The general ideas are somewhat explained on my blog

http://cournape.wordpress.com/?s=numscons

And also the slides from SciPy08 conf:

http://conference.scipy.org/static/wiki/numscons.pdf

It is plugged into distutils through a scons command (which bypasses
all the compiled build_* ones, so that the whole build is done through
scons for correct dependency handling). It is not really meant as a
general replacement (it is too fragile, partly because of distutils,
partly because of scons, partly because of me), but it shows it is
possible not only theoretically.

cheers,

David