[Distutils] Add multiple frozen modules

[Mark Hammond]

[Jim laments about freeze and some good enhancements he whipped up]

Here is my personal take on this.  It is formed simply by working with
freeze, at one stage attempting to generate interest in helping extend
freeze, and watching what other people do when faced with a similar
problem.

I get the impression freeze is dieing.  It is dieing in favour of
techniques that avoid requiring a C compiler and allow an even more generic
concept of where "frozen" code can come from.  Although avoiding the C
compiler is particularly attractive on Windows (where users can't be
assumed to have one), it offers a number of other benefits on all
platforms.  Specifically, Greg Stien and Gordon McMillan (and plenty of
people before them :-) seem to have what is considered "state of the art"
in where this is heading.

But "where it is heading" is the rub.  Freeze is still well ahead in a
number of significant areas.  The ideas you describe are definately
worth-while, but freeze works OK for me now - so whenever I next get a
decent block of time to play with this stuff some more, I am likely to
focus on these other efforts other than freeze.

I dont think you will find many people arguing either way on this.  My only
comment is that re Point 2: PyImport_ExtendInittab() is indeed able to give
the functionality you describe.  Each seperate frozen package can call this
function to add its frozen modules.  So this means your patch for this
should be unnecessary (or at least slightly different to take advantage of
this).  Re point 1:  This is possible (or nearly :) for Windows freeze
builds, but AFAIK not for Unix builds, so this definately seems worthwhile.

And-it-still-needs-more-hacks-to-complete-COM-support-ly,

Mark.