[SciPy-Dev] Are you using Bento to build scipy?

[Ralf Gommers]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 3:22 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 16, 2018, 12:53 Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>> What advantages scikit-build (which glues CMake and setuptools
>>> together) brings?
>>>
>>
>> If I understand correctly, scikit-build doesn't use anything from
>> setuptools - it just copied the setup.py user interface. That's still a
>> significant mistake imho, it should have a saner UI (declarative). But
>> that's still minor compared to the advantages it has.
>>
>
> For a bit of background here...
>
> When you run 'pip install <whatever>', and pip can't find a wheel, then it
> automatically downloads the source release and then invokes setup.py, while
> making various undocumented assumptions about exactly how setup.py works.
> So alternative build systems actually *have* to provide some kind of
> awkward setup.py interface to keep 'pip install' working.
>

Indeed. But this is way nicer, just a minimal shim:
https://cournape.github.io/Bento/html/transition.html#adding-bento-based-setup-py-for-compatibility-with-pip-etc

Anyway, I don't have time to spend on this, so I'm not worrying about it
until after we have PEP 517.

This is a significant part of why so few people try to replace distutils.
> (I think.)
>
>
>> Beyond better builds and IDE support, also support for cross-compiling
>> could be valuable.
>>
>> Finally, on a bigger picture level - distutils is badly maintained and
>> good patches can go unmerged, while numpy.distutils is a pain to maintain.
>> An actively developed sane build tool will be valuable to both us and the
>> wider ecosystem.
>>
>
> The way distutils plugin system works, almost any changes can break
> people, plus the biggest issues are with the fundamental architecture. So
> yeah, it's pretty much impossible to make distutils better.
>

Agreed. I was more thinking about obviously correct 1 line patches that go
unmerged.

Ralf


> Instead, the general goal of the packaging maintainers at this point is to
> get rid of distutils. The big thing that will enable this is PEP 517, which
> replaces setup.py with a much smaller and properly-specified interface for
> new build systems to implement. The hope is that if creating alternative
> build systems becomes an easy and supported thing to do, then better
> options will emerge, and we'll get out of this situation where there's one
> tool everyone has to use and which isn't really good for anyone.
>
> Unfortunately, support for this hasn't quite landed in pip yet. But that's
> the direction that things are going.
>
> -n
>
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