how do you prevent distutils from downloading and building packages without consent?

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:59:15 -0300, lkcl <luke.leighton at googlemail.com>  
escribió:

> a number of people using pyjamas are not only encountering
> difficulties with setup.py endeavouring to download and install
> "setuptools" but also they are ... the best word to use is
> unfortunately "offended" - by the fact that distutils, in its default
> configuration, downloads and even _compiles_ its dependencies -
> *without consent*.
>
> a copy of the setup.py can be found here:
> http://pyjamas.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pyjamas/trunk/setup.py

distutils doesn't attempt to download *anything*. You're confusing it with  
setuptools and easy_install, which is a different beast.
Your setup.py seems overly complicated to me. For a pure Python package,  
setup.py looks like this:

 from distutils.core import setup
setup(name='Foo package',
       description='My fine foo package',
       version='1.0',
       packages=['foo'])

Two statements, nothing more. To include an extension module bar.c:

setup(...
       ext_modules=[Extension('bar', ['bar.c', 'other.c'])],
       ...)

See http://docs.python.org/distutils/index.html

-- 
Gabriel Genellina