[Distutils] Access to Python config info

[Greg Ward]

Quoth Greg Stein, on 16 December 1998:
> I believe the public interface will/should always be a set of names and
> values. Even if we do a hack in lieu of native Python support, we should
> just set globals for use by clients.
> 
> There may be functions in there, too, for compiler invocation and stuff
> (as John recommends). I'm not clear on whether that needs to be in
> sysconfig.py or part of the distutils package (forgot the pkg name).

I agree: sysconfig.py should be a flat list of globals.  A brain-dump of
Python's configuration info, as it were.

This implies that any functions/methods (eg. for invoking the compiler)
belong in some distutils module.  After all, this is the 'distutils'
project; as much code as possible should go in the 'distutils' package.
sysconfig should just be a flat braindump.

> All right, you Perl hacker. We'll have none of this here! Python doesn't
> have "hashes" ... it has dictionaries! Also, it is always possible to
> view module globals as a dictionary (with vars(sysconfig)), so there
> isn't a need for another level containing a dictionary.
> 
> Go home Perl hacker!

My list of gripes with Python is pretty small, but I think the main one
is that the word "Dictionary" is just too long to type.  And when you
write as many comments as I do, that matters... ;-)

Just another /^P\w+/ hacker...

        Greg

PS. Oops, I just realized that regex also lets Pascal in, and PL1 (of
course it should be written "PL/1" [or is it "PL/I"?]), and
Prolog... hmmm... back to the drawing board...

-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                    gward@cnri.reston.va.us
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