[Distutils] Beginnings of a C/C++ compiler interface

[Ovidiu Predescu]

On Mon, 12 Jul 1999 14:56:21 -0400 (EDT), "Michael P. Reilly" 
<arcege@shore.net> wrote:

> Please read the charter and requirements doc for the Distutils-SIG.
> You will find that the tools being discussed and developed are for the
> developers, not necessarily for the installers/end-users.
>
> Autoconf is a tool for the developer, but does not test anything.. it
> generates a ./configure script, for UNIX-based systems only.  
>
> Autoconf requires m4 to be compiled and understood.  M4 is very nice,
> but it is a language that not everyone can understand easily.  Asking
> everyone to learn autoconf and m4 is as bad as the Perl crew requiring
> that Perl/C extensions be written in XS.
> 
> So the point of the Distutils SIG was to develop some standards and some
> (Python or C based) tools to aid the aspiring module developers out there
> in creating easily packagable distributions.  Autoconf doesn't cut the
> mustard (tho I like it :), especially for non-UNIX developing.

Yes, I read the requirements doc for this SIG when I joined it, that's exactly
why I joined this SIG. I need a tool that helps me package the Python code that
I'm writing.

I used autoconf to write the configuration process for all the free or
proprietary software that I wrote. I see no problem in learning how to write a
configure.in script. m4 and autoconf are small little tools that are very easy
to learn compared to the amount of software an experienced developer has to
learn.

As I already wrote in a previous post, I don't argue about the utility of a
Python packager tool but about how useful would be to work on a configuration
tool right now.

Some of the extensions that I wrote use configure to check for header files and
library versions. These things are very well done by autoconf, and my point is
that we probably don't need another tool to do this. What we need though is
standard way to integrate configure in the process of building a package. In a
normal C package that uses configure, this is done by running configure and
then make. The question is how configure could be integrated with the distutils
setup.py script? How are the configure options passed to it and what is the
order of execution, first configure and then setup.py? Just wondering if this
is reasonable...

Greetings,
-- 
Ovidiu Predescu <ovidiu@cup.hp.com>
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/7464/