Build bugs in Python 2.2.1?

[Donn Cave]

Quoth martin at v.loewis.de (Martin v. Loewis):
| Jonathan Hogg <jonathan at onegoodidea.com> writes:
...
|> I'd be happy to aid in helping with using autoconf to manage the entire
|> build process if there was a good chance of it being accepted into the
|> standard distribution.
|
| I guess you try to incorporate changes one-by-one, with some long-term
| goal in mind. It is impossible to predict what reactions a change to
| the build procedure will cause.
|
| I can tell for certain that a process that reverts setup.py to use
| autoconf instead will be rejected.

Well, that's sure encouraging!  All of this is probably true, but
had the same attitude hovered over the move to setup.py in 2.1,
we'd still be using autoconfig, right?

Speaking as someone who has tried to do this - submit changes
that use configure to deal with things that setup.py currently
can't do a very good job with, like library and include paths -
I can understand why he'd want some faint expression of enthusiasm,
and it's too bad this is what he gets instead.

I'm not the biggest fan of setup.py, but I don't think it needs
to be a choice between setup.py and autoconfig.  There are all
kinds of ways to get information from configure into setup.py,
and all we need is to find one that might be ideologically
acceptable to the folks who check stuff in.  Otherwise, big
waste of time guaranteed.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com