[Python-Dev] Platform extension for distutils on other interpreters than CPython (original) (raw)

Tarek Ziadé ziade.tarek at gmail.com
Tue Feb 23 21:10:01 CET 2010

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:

Hello.

I would like to have a feature on platform module (or sys or somewhere) that can tell distutils or distutils2 that this platform (be it PyPy or Jython) is not able to compile any C module. The purpose of this is to make distutils bail out in more reasonable manner than a compilation error in case this module is not going to work on anything but CPython. What do you think? +1 I think we could have a global variable in sys, called "dontcompile", distutils would look at before it tris to compile stuff, exactly like how it does for pyc file (sys.dontwritebytecode) Or... wait : we already know if we are using CPython, or Jython reading sys.platform. So I could simply not trigger the compilation in case sys.platform is one of the CPythons and keep in distutils side a list of the platform names, Extension is incompatible with. That makes me wonder : why don't we have a sys.implementation variable ? (cython/jython/pypi), since we can have several values for cython in sys.platform Tarek That's pypy. pypi is something else. sys.platform is not any good, since for example PyPy, and possibly any other python implementation that is not CPython, but it's not tied to any particular platform (like parrot) would say "linux2" or "win32". sys.implementation sounds good, but it'll also require a list in stdlib what's fine and what's not fine and a flag sounds like something that everyone can set, not asking to be listed in stdlib. How about sys.implementation.supportsextensions?

I think its the other way around:

You are making the assumption that, sys knows about distutils extensions. and there's no indication about the kind of extension here (C, etc..).

In distutils, the Extension class works with a compiler class (ccompiler, mingwcompiler, etc) And in theory, people could add a new compiler that works under PyPy or Jython.

So I think it's up to the Compiler class (through the Extension instance) to decide if the environment is suitable.

For instance in the CCompiler class I can write things like:

if sys.implementation != 'cython': warning.warn('Sorry I cannot compile this under %s' % sys.implementation)

Tarek

-- Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org

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