Re: building/installing Python modules?

[<christoph dot wiedemann at daimlerchrysler dot com>]

skip> Sure, if all you want to distribute is a few extension modules.  What 
about
skip> if you want to distribute the library they wrap as well?  That's where the
skip> auto*/libtool gang comes in (I hope - it's difficult enough for me to 
figure
skip> out how this works that I'm still pondering the benefits).  Distutils 
won't
skip> help there, and in that case, by eliminating setup.py I would be 
eliminating
skip> yet another configuration file format people have to know about.  (Forget
skip> that it happens to be Python code.  You still have to know what calls to
skip> make.)

OK, i agree with that. 

I thought of using the auto* tools for building python extensions a few months 
ago now, but since i was using swig, i did not know how to integrate the swig
meta files (*_wrap.c) into the auto* stuff - the way to write a script which 
edits
the Makefile.in does not look practical to me. Now i have a patchwork, using
GNU make (to generate the meta files) together with distutils (build / install
the extensions). Very unsatisfying.

Christoph