[Distutils] People want CPAN

[David Cournapeau]

Greg Ewing wrote:
> As far as I can tell David seems to be saying that
> instantiating a class for every file in the system
> would be too much overhead.
>
> I'm not convinced about that -- make builds a dependency
> graph with a node for every target before it goes
> to work, and I think scons does something similar

Yes, and scons has scalability problems because of this (both from CPU
and memory POV).

Waf has also an object per node, but it is aggressively optimized. If
you are interested in the details, I can point you to the corresponding
discussions in both scons and waf, where the main designers were involved.

> But that's not to say that a class couldn't be devised
> that allowed the required flexibility without degenerating
> into just a string with textual substitutions.

I am not saying that's impossible, but both waf an scons use string
susbtitution to do it (they do it differently though). So you would have
to find a good reason not to do it IMHO.

cheers,

David