[SciPy-dev] build system for scikit

[David Cournapeau]

Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:

> 
> Creating something new which is "automatic" and tries to guess the 
> location of CHOLMOD across different platforms is in my opinion a waste 
> of time and makes things worse.

It depends on what you mean by automatic: autoconf/cmake configuration 
schemes are automatic, and they work very well for packages much more 
complex than python will ever need (e.g. KDE and Gnome).

Ideally, there should be a way to do:

configure --with-libfoo=/usr/local

or

configure --with-libfoo-includedir=/usr/local/include 
--with-libfoo-libdir=/usr/local/lib

So that you can configure foo how you want, and inside your setup.py, 
there would be something like

def check_foo(env):
     try:
         env.check_header("amd_foo.h")
     except CompileError:
         old_env = env.Append({"CPPPATH": ["$prefix/suitesparse"]})
         try:
             env.check_header("amd_foo.h")
         finally:
             env = old_env

With abstracted machinery to deal with the options given at the command 
line.

But that's typically the kind of things made difficult with distutils 
commands scheme.

David