[Distutils] Python packaging + conditional use of C library shipped with the package

[Laurent Gautier]

On 07/08/2013 05:33 PM, zooko wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 08, 2013 at 01:01:25PM +0200, Laurent Gautier wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I would like to make a package that is able to use a system's given
>> C-library if found, or compile its own version shipped with the
>> package.
> We do something similar in pycryptopp, but instead of automatically testing for
> the locally-available C library, we just ask the human to manually pass
> "--disable-embedded-cryptopp" if they want it to attempt to link to a library
> external to its own bundled one:
>
> https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/browser/git/setup.py?annotate=blame&rev=f789ed951b49b33e7cc49d16fdc8b398f7ec7223

Thanks for this, I'll look at it.

>> - Is there a distutils/distribute facility to help test for the
>> presence (and version) of a C library, or do I have to roll my own
>> system ?
> If you succeed at this, I'd like to know how you did it! Maybe we could do
> something similar for pycryptopp.

pyzmq seems to be doing this sort of thing (from a quick look, it seems 
like they are implementing something similar to what autoconf can do), 
but that's a lot of work if each project must reimplement its own.

>
>> - When having the source for a C library shipping with a package, is
>> there a way to get distutils/distribute compile it, and get it seen
>> by Python at runtime (so I can just use ctypes, or cffi, and even C
>> extensions in other Python package see the headers and compiled
>> libraries) ?
> I don't understand the question. This sounds like the normal thing that
> distutils has always done for modules made up of compiled C code.

May be I was not clear enough. What I mean is the C library is just a C 
library, not a C-extension to Python.
For example:

mypackage/
     clib/
         myClibrary.c
         myClibrary.h
     src/
         mypackage.py (calling myClibrary.so)


myotherpackage/
     clib/
         myotherClibrary.c (requiring myClibrary.h, and obviously link 
to myClibrary.so)


I'll look at the code example you are giving and see it this is 
automagically taken care of by the package installation system.

L.
>
> By the way, if I were starting pycryptopp today I would use cffi. (And I would
> name it "crpyto".)
>
> Regards,
>
> Zooko