skip> For example, if I have this chain of dependencies: skip> skip> build/lib.linux-i686-2.3/array.so skip> skip> depends on skip> skip> build/temp.linux-i686-2.3/arraymodule.o skip> skip> which depends on skip> skip> Modules/arraymodule.c skip> skip> (the locations of the .o and .so files are determined by distutils) and then skip> diddle some bits in arraymodule.c, neither .../arraymodule.o nor skip> ..../array.so get rebuilt the next time I run make. For the person skip> installing one time from source this isn't a significant problem, but can be skip> a nightmare for a developer, especially if something more global changes skip> like Includes/object.h...
On my system (linux 2.4, python 2.1.1), the dependency stuff works well. In fact in the above situation, one single 'python setup.py install' command would be enough. But i agree, that the build support of distutils is limited to small extension modules (if you want to mix extension modules with binary applications or build an application with embedded python, the distutils support fails). However, for a python developer it has much less effort to use distutils, because one does only has to learn _one_ language (python) instead of 3 or 4 for the auto* stuff.
