[Distutils] Source and patch: swig support (and more)

[Greg Ward]

On 16 June 2000, Thomas Heller said:
> The included source code and patch implements
> a swig class (derived from ccompiler).

Disclaimer: I haven't looked at SWIG or read its docs in something like
3 years, I have only scanned your patch, and I have barely thought about 
the right way to implement SWIG support.

That said, this seems like a strange way to do it.  I had been vaguely
thinking of adding a pre-compilation step to the build_ext command; the
idea of a new CCompiler class for something that really isn't a C
compiler at all hadn't occurred to me, probably because it's just plain
weird.

Any particular reason you did it this way?

> Simply include 'xxx.i' files into your extension source-files,
> and swig will be used to generate 'xxx.cpp' files, which will
> then be compiled and linked.

That can probably be handled by a little conspiracy between the
Extension class and the build_ext command; again, I fail to see the
benefit of a CCompiler class for this.

> Other stuff included (only useful for the windows crowd)
> Resource scripts (*.rc) and message compiler files (*.mc)
> can also be used as extension source files, and MSVC
> will invoke rc.exe and mc.exe to create .res files
> and pass them to the linker.

Sounds uncontroversial.  Can you submit that as a separate patch?
Thanks!

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - programmer-at-big                           gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
I brought my BOWLING BALL -- and some DRUGS!!