[PyKDE] SIP and distutils

[Giovanni Bajo]

Phil Thompson <phil at riverbankcomputing.co.uk> wrote:

> The main requirement for PyQt is that it must be built with exactly the
> same flags as was used to build Qt. Hence the build system must parse the
> qmake configuration, so any integration would involve distutils extracting
> that information from sipconfig.py/pyqtconfig.py.

I don't think this is a problem per-se. What I want is a binding which
allows simple SIP modules to compile "out-of-the-box" with distutils. A
simple script such this one should be sufficient to portably build, install,
distribute simple packages:

=========================================
from distutils.core import setup
from distutils.extension import Extension
from sip import build_ext    # magic to bind to distutils

setup(
  name = 'foo',
  ext_modules=[
    Extension("foo",        ["foo.sip"]),
    ],
  cmdclass = {'build_ext': build_ext}
)
=========================================

Notice that this is exactly how Pyrex works, for instance. setuptools (which
is scheduled to be integrated into distutils for Python 2.5) already has
transparent support for SWIG, for instance.

> Note that the build system has changed with current SIP and PyQt snapshots
> in that SIP doesn't know anything about the Qt installation anymore. It
> would now be possible (I think) to throw away the current build system an
> use distutils for SIP and qmake for PyQt.

As a first step, I'd be happy to provide enough integration that packages
using SIP will be able to build with distutils. Later, we can switch SIP
itself to use distutils, if we feel it's the right thing to do. For that,
you'll have to release at least a development snapshot with this new build
system, so that people can work on it.
-- 
Giovanni Bajo