[Distutils] People want CPAN

[Greg Ewing]

Tarek Ziadé wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 12:03 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:

>> You cannot obtain this with classes and objects (especially when you
>> start talking about performance: thousand of source files for one
>> extension is not a crazy usercase).
> 
> Sorry, I am getting confused here. This is getting all mixed up.
> What OOP has to do with performance in the first place ?

As far as I can tell David seems to be saying that
instantiating a class for every file in the system
would be too much overhead.

I'm not convinced about that -- make builds a dependency
graph with a node for every target before it goes
to work, and I think scons does something similar
(although I might be wrong, I haven't looked at
scons very closely yet).

 >> $CC $CFLAGS $CPPDEFINES $CPPPATH -c $SOURCE $TARGET
 >>
 >> You need to be able to control those variable content in a very fine
 >> grained manner: prepending and appending may lead to different
 >> compiler behavior

It's true that the current distutils compiler classes
are lacking in flexibility here -- there's an option for
"extra flags", for example, but it sticks them all at
the end of the command. Sometimes that's wrong -- I've
had trouble trying to use it for MacOSX -F arguments,
for example.

But that's not to say that a class couldn't be devised
that allowed the required flexibility without degenerating
into just a string with textual substitutions.

-- 
Greg