On 17 July 2013 12:10, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I can't imagine it's practical to auto-install a C compiler
Why not? > - or even to check for one before building. > > But I can see it being useful for > introspection purposes to know about this type of requirement. (A C compiler > could be necessary, or optional for speedups, a particular external library > could be needed, etc) Perhaps instead the installer tool would give you a way to clarify that you do have a C compiler and to warn if not. Alternatively a meta-package could be used to indicate (when installed) that a compatible C-compiler is available and then other distributions could depend on it for building. > The data would likely only be as good as what project developers provide, > but nevertheless having standard places to record the data could encourage > doing so... > > OTOH, maybe this is metadata 3.0 stuff - I feel like at the moment we need > to get what we have now out of the door rather than continually adding extra > capabilities. I wasn't proposing to hold anything up or add new capabilities. I'm just trying to see how far these changes go towards making non-pure Python software automatically installable. Everything I would want to build "build requires" software that is not on pypi. It would be great if e.g. the instructions for installing Cython on Windows could just be "pip install cython" instead of this: http://wiki.cython.org/InstallingOnWindows Oscar _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
