[Python-Dev] zlib not compiled by default

[Greg Ward]

On 12 July 2000, Guido van Rossum said:
> I would love to have a mechanism (run by configure or maybe better by
> makesetup) that automatically determines if a particular external
> library package is available.  Come to think of it, in first
> approximation, makesetup could easily parse the -I, -L and -l options
> you specify for a particular extension and only build it if it can
> find all those...

The Distutils "config" command is *achingly* close to supporting this
kind of trickery.  (Yes, I finally buckled and started implementing
Autoconf in Python.  Turned out not to be too hard.)

I promised I'll think really hard about how to get it working really
well next week, when I'm on holiday... ;-)

        Greg