3. 使用distutils构建C和C++扩展

Starting in Python 1.4, Python provides, on Unix, a special make file for building make files for building dynamically-linked extensions and custom interpreters. Starting with Python 2.0, this mechanism (known as related to Makefile.pre.in, and Setup files) is no longer supported. Building custom interpreters was rarely used, and extension modules can be built using distutils.

Building an extension module using distutils requires that distutils is installed on the build machine, which is included in Python 2.x and available separately for Python 1.5. Since distutils also supports creation of binary packages, users don’t necessarily need a compiler and distutils to install the extension.

一个distutils包包含了一个驱动脚本 setup.py 。这是个纯Python文件,大多数时候也很简单,看起来如下:

from distutils.core import setup, Extension

module1 = Extension('demo',
                    sources = ['demo.c'])

setup (name = 'PackageName',
       version = '1.0',
       description = 'This is a demo package',
       ext_modules = [module1])

通过文件 setup.py ,和文件 demo.c ,运行如下

python setup.py build

这会编译 demo.c ,然后产生一个扩展模块叫做 demo 在目录 build 里。依赖于系统,模块文件会放在某个子目录形如 build/lib.system ,名字可能是 demo.sodemo.pyd

In the setup.py, all execution is performed by calling the setup function. This takes a variable number of keyword arguments, of which the example above uses only a subset. Specifically, the example specifies meta-information to build packages, and it specifies the contents of the package. Normally, a package will contain of addition modules, like Python source modules, documentation, subpackages, etc. Please refer to the distutils documentation in 分发 Python 模块(遗留版本) to learn more about the features of distutils; this section explains building extension modules only.

It is common to pre-compute arguments to setup(), to better structure the driver script. In the example above, the ext_modules argument to setup() is a list of extension modules, each of which is an instance of the Extension. In the example, the instance defines an extension named demo which is build by compiling a single source file, demo.c.

更多时候,构建一个扩展会复杂的多,需要额外的预处理器定义和库。如下例子展示了这些。

from distutils.core import setup, Extension

module1 = Extension('demo',
                    define_macros = [('MAJOR_VERSION', '1'),
                                     ('MINOR_VERSION', '0')],
                    include_dirs = ['/usr/local/include'],
                    libraries = ['tcl83'],
                    library_dirs = ['/usr/local/lib'],
                    sources = ['demo.c'])

setup (name = 'PackageName',
       version = '1.0',
       description = 'This is a demo package',
       author = 'Martin v. Loewis',
       author_email = 'martin@v.loewis.de',
       url = 'https://docs.python.org/extending/building',
       long_description = '''
This is really just a demo package.
''',
       ext_modules = [module1])

In this example, setup() is called with additional meta-information, which is recommended when distribution packages have to be built. For the extension itself, it specifies preprocessor defines, include directories, library directories, and libraries. Depending on the compiler, distutils passes this information in different ways to the compiler. For example, on Unix, this may result in the compilation commands

gcc -DNDEBUG -g -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -DMAJOR_VERSION=1 -DMINOR_VERSION=0 -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include/python2.2 -c demo.c -o build/temp.linux-i686-2.2/demo.o

gcc -shared build/temp.linux-i686-2.2/demo.o -L/usr/local/lib -ltcl83 -o build/lib.linux-i686-2.2/demo.so

这些行代码仅用于展示目的;distutils用户应该相信distutils能正确调用。

3.1. 发布你的扩展模块

当一个扩展已经成功的构建过,有三种方式使用。

最终用户通常想要安装模块,可以这么运行

python setup.py install

模块维护者应该制作源码包;要实现可以运行

python setup.py sdist

In some cases, additional files need to be included in a source distribution; this is done through a MANIFEST.in file; see the distutils documentation for details.

如果源码发行包成功构建了,维护者也可以创建二进制发行包。依赖于平台,一个可用的命令如下

python setup.py bdist_wininst
python setup.py bdist_rpm
python setup.py bdist_dumb