[Distutils] waf can be used to compile Python extension modules

[Paul Moore]

On 23 March 2014 23:13, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now you begin to see the scope of the problem. It's definitely solvable, but
> means asking a whole pile of "required, recommended or distutils-specific?"
> questions about the existing distutils and setuptools build system :)
>
> "pip already relies on it" sets the minimum for the "required" category, but
> there's more to a full build system abstraction than what pip currently
> supports.

OK, I see now. So the ultimate build system will include pip changes
to supply build-time options in an as-yet unspecified manner.

There's certainly no way I can do all of that myself, I don't have
remotely the level of experience with complex build requirements. But
I can probably take the first steps, and leave it to people with the
experience to add to it. No promises on timescales but I'll see what I
can do.

One thought. do we want to use a setup.py script as the interface,
with all its historical baggage, or would we be better using a new
script name as the "official" interface (with pip falling back to
equivalent setup.py invocations when that script isn't present, for
backward compatibility)?

Paul