How to create both a c extension and a pure python package

[Thomas Jollans]

On 09/03/2021 23:42, Marco Sulla wrote:
> As title. Currently I ended up using this trick in my setup.py:
>
>
> if len(argv) > 1 and argv[1] == "c":
>      sys.argv = [sys.argv[0]] + sys.argv[2:]
>      setuptools.setup(ext_modules = ext_modules, **common_setup_args)
> else:
>      setuptools.setup(**common_setup_args)
>
>
> So if I pass "c" as the first argument of ./setup.py , the c extension
> is builded, otherwise the py version is packaged.
>
> Is there not a better way to do this?


Why are you doing this?

If all you want is for it to be possible to install the package from 
source on a system that can't use the C part, you could just declare 
your extension modules optional, with the "optional" argument to 
setuptools.Extension. see 
(https://docs.python.org/3/distutils/apiref.html#distutils.core.Extension)


- Thomas