[Distutils] Fwd: Adding a "Pure Python" flag to PyPI

[Hanno Schlichting]

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 10:21 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> However, downloading the source distribution and inspecting it should
> be fairly reliable.

Depends on what you want to find out. I know a bunch of packages which
contain optional C extensions. These certainly aren't pure-python and
contain C files in their source distributions. But during "setup.py
install" they'll catch any compilation errors and skip the extension
build step. So they are perfectly usable without a C compiler. Or they
employ even more logic in their setup.py files and make the C
extension conditional on the current platform - like disabling them in
PyPy or Jython.

Just two examples are zope.interface and Jinja2, which has an entirely
optional C extension via setuptools feature support.

I guess all I'm asking for is a better name that makes the intent clearer.

Hanno