Survey of complex usage of distutils.

[Fernando Perez]

Anthony Baxter wrote:

> I'm currently documenting the Distutils innards (working document can
> be found at
>
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/python/python/nondist/sandbox/distutilsref).
> As part of this I'm identifying bits of distutils that could be removed, or
> replaced with standard python modules. The two modules most likely at the
> moment are distutils.log and distutils.fancy_getopt.
> 
> The problem is that no-one knows what people are using today from distutils.
> There's never been an "official" API, so it's possible that there's wild
> and wacky usage of distutils internals. If you have written a setup.py that
> is using more than just the basic distutils.core functionality, could you
> please contact me and let me know what other functionality you're using?
> Similarly, if you know of a package that uses more complex distutils code,
> I'd like to hear about it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Anthony

_please_ get in touch with the scipy.org crowd.  Their distutils setup is by far
the most complex I've seen out in the wild, and I've heard people say in the
mailing list that they wanted to revert some of their additions to the main
trunk.  I think talking to them would be extremely beneficial.

Pyrex also seems to have extended distutils a bit, although not as radically as
scipy.

Cheers,

f.