[Distutils] Minor issues

Greg Ward gward@python.net
Fri Sep 15 21:45:10 2000


On 11 September 2000, Bastian Kleineidam said:
> 1) Why is the --formats list comma-separated and the --include-dirs and 
>    --library-dirs lists not? They are separated by os.pathsep.
>    Well, at least its documented :)

Just because.

No seriously: MS-DOS and Unix each have well-established conventions for
lists of directories; semicolon is the separator under DOS, and colon
under Unix.  So we use the local convention.

The formats list is just a list of strings, and I've always thought that 
comma is a perfectly good delimiter for lists of strings.

> 2) The os.pathsep separator is not documented in the help text:
>    > python setup.py build_ext --help

Fixed, thanks.

        Greg