On 2009-11-11 15:02 PM, Greg Ewing wrote:
Tarek Ziadé wrote:
If the answer to that solution is just: "Distutils sucks anyways..",
it is not really helpfull imho..
I don't see the point to write Distutils from scratch, instead of
making it evolve.
If you can see a way to get from the current distutils
code to something with a well-designed and well-documented
API and a clean implementation, that would be fine by
me.
When I say it's fundamentally broken, I'm really talking
about the API. My idea of what an API for a build system
should be like is more like make or scons, which slice
the functionality up in a completely orthogonal direction
to the way distutils does.
Maybe it would be possible to plug such a system in under
the existing build_ext class. I don't know.
In fact, David has.
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/numscons/
> I think I
> would like the same philosophy applied to other areas
> of distutils, not just compiling extensions. Otherwise
> it would feel like two incompatible systems bolted
> together.
It does feel something like that. The build system is just one of the problems
with distutils' internals, in my experience. You can think of the rest of
distutils as a little application framework for command line utilities. I think
this framework simply fails to provide in very fundamental ways, like the
"extend commands by subclassing" design pattern. That choice makes it
fundamentally difficult to combine extensions together. I really don't see a way
to evolve away from that (and believe me, over the last decade, I've tried). You
just need to redesign the internals if you want to get away from that. You can't
get from any point A to any point B by evolving in small steps that are
functional (not to mention backwards compatible!) all the way through.
With all respect to Greg Ward and the rest of the original distutils authors, it
was a fantastic improvement over the state of affairs ten years ago, but we've
learned a lot about application frameworks and about building software since then.
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
_______________________________________________
Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
