[Distutils] C extension modules

[David Cournapeau]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 6:58 PM, Floris Bruynooghe
<floris.bruynooghe at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 10:57:37AM +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 2:30 AM, Torsten Mohr <tmohr at s.netic.de> wrote:
>> > What is the preferred way to make this information available to
>> > the compiler so i can use code like #ifdef HOST_posix?
>>
>> Use a config.h, like autoconf does. Distutils does not make it for
>> you, and plugging the necessary code in distutils to do it is a PITA,
>> but that's doable.
>>
>> Basically, you need to extend the distutils config command, and goes
>> from there:
>
> Neat, I didn't know that command existed.
>
>> class MyConfig(config):
>>     def check_headers(self, headers=None):
>
> Why do you define this yourself?

That was just meant as an illustrative purpose - I do not recommend to
code things as is :) Note that in practice, this is actually difficult
to use for non trivial stuff, because the MyConfig class runs in a
difference context than the setup call.

> Also, does anyone have an idea why config.check_func() and
> CCompiler.has_function() basically seem to be doing the same?

Those kind of redundancies are common in distutils - often, they have
some small differences in how build directories are set, or things
like that, although I was not aware of this redundancy (I avoid
CCompiler functions like the plague in numpy.distutils extensions,
because their behavior is very platform specific, especially between
MS compiler and Unix ones, where the attributes are not the same).

David