[Distutils] Byte-compilation revisited

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Greg Ward wrote:
> 
> Hi all --
> 
> based on and inspired by recent patches from Marc-Andre Lemburg and Rene
> Liebscher, I've finally started tackling the byte-compilation problem in
> earnest.  Here's the approach I'm taking:
>   * new function 'byte_compile()' in distutils.util: this is the all-
>     singing, all-dancing wrapper around py_compile that will do all
>     the real work
>   * reduce the 'bytecompile()' method in the install_lib command to
>     a simple wrapper around 'util.byte_compile()', that does the Right
>     Thing with respect to optimization and claimed source filename
>     written to the .py{c,o} file
>   * add similar functionality to the build_py command, so that you
>     may optionally do byte-compilation at build time rather than
>     install time.
> 
> The first two steps are done and checked in, except that install_lib's
> 'bytecompile()' method doesn't yet take advantage of the fancy features
> in the new 'byte_compile()' -- it doesn't rewrite filenames or do
> optimization.
> 
> The default will continue to be doing compilation at install time rather
> than build time.  I'm still leaning towards build-time compilation, but
> it's too late in the Distutils 1.0 release cycle to change things like
> this.  However, I want to have the *option* to do compilation at build
> time, so people can experiment with it, see if it works, figure out what
> other features are needed so it really works, etc.  The idea is that
> developers could put settings in their setup.cfg that control when to do
> byte-compilation; I suspect developers who want to distribute
> closed-source modules will have to do build-time compilation.  Probably
> the "install" command will need some sort of "don't install source"
> option, or maybe the build command should have a "blow away source after
> compiling it" option.

The latter is not very useful, IMHO. I will definitely need the
"compile at build time and don't argue about not finding the sources
at install time" option ;-)
 
> Here's my 'byte_compile()' function: as usual, it works for me.  Please
> review it, and if you're following CVS, try it out.  (Should be enough
> to install any module distribution containing pure Python modules.)

Looks ok , except that I would pass the Python filenames through
os.path.abspath() before writing any externally run scripts...
both to work around possible security problems and to make sure
the shell finds the right files.
 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> def byte_compile (py_files,
>                   optimize=0, force=0,
>                   prefix=None, base_dir=None,
>                   verbose=1, dry_run=0,
>                   direct=None):
> ...

--
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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