[Gdal-dev] Python next-gen bindings enabled in trunk

[Christopher Barker]

Howard Butler wrote:
>  - It's not apparent what we want to do for defaults on the 'make 
> install' target of ./swig/python based on the discussions on the list.  
> Can someone come up with a concise proposal?

I've been following this, so I'll try to write up a summary of what the 
consensus seems to be where there is one, and the options where it is 
not clear to me that a consensus has been reached.

Install does two things (more?)

1) install the python bindings themselves.

There are two options here:

A) don't install them -- let the user run distutils themselves.
This way they can set whatever other options they want. Maybe this 
should be the case for building as well. It's the approach I've most 
commonly seen with python packages based on C/C++ libs -- make to build 
the lib, distutils to build/install the extension. It makes it easier to 
build for multiple versions of python, build binary packages, etc.

B) Have make build and install, via distutils.
  To build -- call python setup.py build.

  To install -- call python setup.py install, but:

  If (default):
   -- They get installed by distutils into site-packages
  else if (prefix is set):
   -- Here we have a couple options:
     a) install in prefix -- I think this is poor choice
     b) have a separate "python-prefix" value, and install it there (you 
can pass an install path into distutils) if $prefix exists, and 
$python-prefix doesn't, I suppose $python-prefix could get set to 
$prefix, so it would work the same as it has been.

2) install the utilities:

It seems the consensus is that the utilities should be installed in 
$prefix, rather than wherever distutils would put them, this means they 
need to be installed by make, or have make or configure configure 
setup.py somehow, based on $prefix -- that sounds messy to me.

A note: There was some talk recently about building a complete set of 
binaries for Windows -- for a few different versions of python. Having 
distutils (and/or setuptools) do all the building and installing 
(including utility scripts) would make this easier to do, so maybe 
having make do it isn't such a good idea.

Hmm -- I'm not sure that cleared anything up, but I think I've laid out 
the options for folks to comment on.

-Chris





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