Comments on: Paver and the building, distribution, deployment etc. of Python projects

By: Kevin Dangoor

Kevin Dangoor — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:58:35 +0000

In what way does it suck? If there’s a compelling reason I might consider *adding* support for a different configuration format. But, I specifically don’t want the limitations of a “dumb” format.

Is it just that you don’t like the extra punctuation?

By: Na, better not.

Na, better not. — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:28:32 +0000

“Python has a very concise, readable syntax.”

Yeah. Except that it sucks for all kinds of configuration. Paver seems like an interesting project. Please do not do configuration in Python. I beg thee. (Yeah, I know, you made up your mind already).

By: Kevin Dangoor

Kevin Dangoor — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:31:26 +0000

@Danny: thanks for the encouragement! Give it a try, the basics work just fine.

@Ed: I haven’t implemented that, because I haven’t needed it thus far. My personal focus is on the libraries that give the higher-level behavior, but I’m opening it up now so that others can add in the things that are useful to them.

I should mention that it’s easy to do things in a non-declarative manner. This is, after all, Python. Where I’ve found that I get tripped up is with declarative systems that don’t provide a full and easy language to do other tasks. Paver doesn’t suffer from that. The bigger trick is going to be building up the right declarative systems on top.

By: Ed Page

Ed Page — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:36:58 +0000

To me, with “modern” build systems, I always feel like they make the general case easy, but anything diverging is difficult. I sometimes write makefiles like scripts just because of the simplicity of them for the desired task. I’ve looked through the documentation but something wasn’t too clear. What I’d like to know is if there is a provided way to do some basic Makefile stuff of file (non-phony) targets/dependencies, especially generic ones?

In Makefile terms, something like
%.o: %.cpp
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $@ $<

If not, One simple way is for
@file_target
That takes a filename, regex, or matching function. A difficulty could be is if you have a generic target and dependency where one is generated from the other. So one possibility is
@file_target_and_need
That takes a substitution regex or a matching function that returns a tuple.

By: danny

danny — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:10:36 +0000

This looks great — I really liked rake, but I’ve been looking for something with a bit more of a pythonic feel. I just wanted to encourage you to keep hacking on it!