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building an extension module with autotools?

Michael George mdgeorge at cs.cornell.edu
Wed Dec 3 17:04:21 EST 2008 
Gerhard Häring wrote:
> Michael George wrote:
>> I've tried using automake, 
>
> In my opinion, this is serious overkill. automake is good for making 
> stuff work on a herd of different Unixen with various combinations of 
> libc functions available etc. But for developing a Python extension, 
> it doesn't help much at all. All you need to know about Python is 
> available via macros if you import Python.h.
>
I'll definitely consider going the simpler route, although the other 
thing that autotools provides is a standard interface for end-users.  
For example I'm picky and don't let anything into /usr that isn't under 
the purview of the package manager.  autotools makes life easy because I 
can just do ./configure --prefix=/opt/pkgname and I know I'm good.  
Custom build setups force me to figure them out before I can install 
(and sometimes even use) the program.

Since I'll be eventually trying to attract users, I'd like to avoid 
scaring them away with custom build scripts :)
> HTH
>
> -- Gerhard

Thanks for the advice.

--Mike
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