[reportlab-users] 2.2 - distutils versus setuptools

[Dirk Holtwick]

Robin Becker schrieb:

> The main problem with our setup script is that we need to find freetype2.

> 

> It seems that the proper way to do this requires us to override 

> build_ext.build_extension so that we can get access to the compiler that 

> gets used at build time ie we need to do things inside out as FLundh 

> does for PIL.

> 

> The unix way then asks the compiler to search for freetype amongst the 

> library dirs that have been set up. The windows way just cannot do that; 

> so we're forced back to using a setup.cfg type mechanism.

> 

> Have the egg people solved the library search problem?


I am not so familiar with extension building with setuptools, but if I 
understand the concept right all eggs are *pre built* for the target 
operating system. This is one of the big advantages of the egg concept. 
Normal users on Windows and Mac usually don't have installed any 
compilers so they are happy to get it all perfectly prepared ;)

Maybe you can get inspirations form the setup file of lxml or any other 
Python project using extensions and egg:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lxml/0.9

BTW: Can't you bundle freetype with the Reportlab distribution?

Dirk