[Numpy-discussion] Setuptools leftover junk (original) (raw)

David M. Cooke cookedm at physics.mcmaster.ca
Fri Jun 30 15:19:26 EDT 2006

On Wed, 28 Jun 2006 13:46:07 -0600 "Fernando Perez" <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:

On 6/28/06, David M. Cooke <cookedm at physics.mcmaster.ca> wrote:

> [Really, distutils sucks. I think (besides refactoring) it needs it's API > documented better, or least good conventions on where to hook into. > setuptools and numpy.distutils do their best, but there's only so much you > can do before everything goes fragile and breaks in unexpected ways.] I do hate distutils, having fought it for a long time. Its piss-poor dependency checking is one of its /many/ annoyances. For a package with as long a compile time as scipy, it really sucks not to be able to just modify random source files and trust that it will really recompile what's needed (no more, no less). Anyway, thanks for heeding this one. Hopefully one day somebody will do the (painful) work of replacing distutils with something that actually works (perhaps using scons for the build engine...) Until then, we'll trod along with massively unnecessary rebuilds :)

I've tried using SCons -- still don't like it. It's python, but it's too unpythonic for me. (The build engine itself is probably fine, though.)

A complete replacement for distutils isn't needed: bits and pieces can be replaced at a time (it gets harder if you've got two packages like setuptools and numpy.distutils trying to improve it, though). For instance, the CCompiler class could be replaced in whole with a rewrite, keeping what could be considered the public API. I've done this before with a version of UnixCCompiler that let me specify a "toolchain": which C compiler and C++ compiler worked together, which linker to use for them, and associated flags.

I'm working (slowly) on a rewrite of commands/build_ext.py in numpy.distutils that should keep track of source dependencies better, for instance.

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|David M. Cooke http://arbutus.physics.mcmaster.ca/dmc/ |cookedm at physics.mcmaster.ca

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