[Python-Dev] Evaluated cmake as an autoconf replacement (original) (raw)

David Cournapeau cournape at gmail.com
Tue Apr 7 19:41:10 CEST 2009

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 2:24 AM, Heikki Toivonen <htoivonen at spikesource.com> wrote:

David Cournapeau wrote:

The hard (or rather time consuming) work is to do everything else that distutils does related to the packaging. That's where scons/waf are more interesting than cmake IMO, because you can "easily" give up this task back to distutils, whereas it is inherently more difficult with cmake. I think this was the first I heard about using SCons this way. Do you have any articles or examples of this? If not, could you perhaps write one?

I developed numscons as an experiment to build numpy, scipy, and other complex python projects depending on many library/compilers:

http://github.com/cournape/numscons/tree/master

The general ideas are somewhat explained on my blog

http://cournape.wordpress.com/?s=numscons

And also the slides from SciPy08 conf:

http://conference.scipy.org/static/wiki/numscons.pdf

It is plugged into distutils through a scons command (which bypasses all the compiled build_* ones, so that the whole build is done through scons for correct dependency handling). It is not really meant as a general replacement (it is too fragile, partly because of distutils, partly because of scons, partly because of me), but it shows it is possible not only theoretically.

cheers,

David

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