Is setup.py a "good thing"? (long)

[Mike Romberg]

>>>>> " " == Mike Clarkson <support> writes:

     > setup.py was introduced in 2.1, presumably to help configure
     > and compile Python, so presumably it's a "good thing".  But I
     > have an uneasy feeling which I will try to explain.

[snip]

  I too have these same concerns about setup.py.  To me it seems that
distutils (which is what I think setup.py uses) does not yet work very
well with C extension modules.  So, why not use configure to deal with
these and let distutils do the pure python stuff.  I suppose distutils
could even call configure.  A setup like this would allow users to
specify Tcl/Tk and other libraries using one of the methods supported
by configure.  As of now I'm not real comfortable with having to hack
setup.py to get _tkinter to build.  I can do this but describing what
needs to be done to others is difficult.  It is more complicated that
a makefile or a simple command line argument to configure.

Mike Romberg (romberg at fsl.noaa.gov)