I became convinced that build was an inherently arbitrary-code process, and not something to be universally handled by a declarative system, when I observed an autotools project under configuration. The things spend ten minutes writing and compiling snippets of C code to determine which features are and are not supported by the runtime. This is *very* arbitrary code and probably one of the tamer things people like to do during builds.
As usual I blame distutils, because the separation is not there. So when you blame setup.py for having to run procedural code to generate the *metadata* you might go to far and think you should also eliminate a procedural build - simply because build and metadata are not adequately separate in the distutils design. Declarative build systems are a nice idea but they are not going to work for everyone. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
