[Distutils] complete GNU readline support, packaging issues

[Greg Ward]

On 27 May 1999, Ovidiu Predescu said:
> I started to investigate the ways to package the work I've done and I
> discovered the distutil package. I'm trying to write a setup.py file, but I
> need the following things and I didn't figure out how to express them:
> 
> - the main C file is obtained by running the m4 program on a .m4 file. How can
> I specify this dependency and the rule for generating the C file?
> 
> - I need to define a C preprocessor macro that contains the version of the
> readline library. The way the things are setup now is by running a configure
> script that determines the version of the library. Can I do this with setup.py?

Alas, the Distutils suite just doesn't have this capability yet: there
is no support for building extension modules.  All the current version
can do is copy .py and .pyc files around.  The key thing is that it
codifies a standard way for copying them around, and provides a fairly
flexible OO framework for adding stuff like building/installing
extension modules.  Unfortunately, I just haven't gotten around to doing 
that stuff yet.

Sorry...

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