[Python-Dev] addressing distutils inability to track file dependencies

[Jack Jansen]

On Thursday, June 13, 2002, at 07:49 , Skip Montanaro wrote:

>
> I wonder if it would be better to have distutils generate the 
> appropriate
> type of makefile and execute that instead of directly building objects 
> and
> shared libraries.  This would finesse some of the dependency tracking
> problems that pop up frequently.

+1

Distutils is very unix-centric in that it expects there to be separate 
compile and link steps. While this can be made to work on Windows (at 
least for MSVC) where there are such separate compilers if you look hard 
enough it can't be made to work for MetroWerks on the Mac, and also for 
MSVC it's a rather funny way to do things.

I would much prefer it if distutils would (optionally) gather all it's 
knowledge and generate a Makefile or an MW projectfile or an MSVC 
projectfile.

For MW distutils already does this (every step simply remembers 
information, and at the "link" step it writes out a project file and 
builds that) but it would be nice if this way of operation was codified.

Note that for people having an IDE this would also make debugging a lot 
easier: if you have an IDE project you can easily do nifty things like 
turn on debugging, use its class browser, etc.
--
- Jack Jansen        <Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com>        
http://www.cwi.nl/~jack -
- If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman -