On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 10:21 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <mar...@v.loewis.de> wrote: > However, downloading the source distribution and inspecting it should > be fairly reliable.
Depends on what you want to find out. I know a bunch of packages which contain optional C extensions. These certainly aren't pure-python and contain C files in their source distributions. But during "setup.py install" they'll catch any compilation errors and skip the extension build step. So they are perfectly usable without a C compiler. Or they employ even more logic in their setup.py files and make the C extension conditional on the current platform - like disabling them in PyPy or Jython. Just two examples are zope.interface and Jinja2, which has an entirely optional C extension via setuptools feature support. I guess all I'm asking for is a better name that makes the intent clearer. Hanno _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig