Module core

The gateway to the Distutils: do everything your setup script needs to do, in a highly flexible and user-driven way. Briefly: create a Distribution instance; find and parse config files; parse the command line; run each Distutils command found there, customized by the options supplied to 'setup()' (as keyword arguments), in config files, and on the command line.

The Distribution instance might be an instance of a class supplied via the 'distclass' keyword argument to 'setup'; if no such class is supplied, then the Distribution class (in dist.py) is instantiated. All other arguments to 'setup' (except for 'cmdclass') are used to set attributes of the Distribution instance.

The 'cmdclass' argument, if supplied, is a dictionary mapping command names to command classes. Each command encountered on the command line will be turned into a command class, which is in turn instantiated; any class found in 'cmdclass' is used in place of the default, which is (for command 'foo_bar') class 'foo_bar' in module 'distutils.command.foo_bar'. The command class must provide a 'user_options' attribute which is a list of option specifiers for 'distutils.fancy_getopt'. Any command-line options between the current and the next command are used to set attributes of the current command object.

When the entire command-line has been successfully parsed, calls the 'run()' method on each command object in turn. This method will be driven entirely by the Distribution object (which each command object has a reference to, thanks to its constructor), and the command-specific options that became attributes of each command object.

Run a setup script in a somewhat controlled environment, and
return the Distribution instance that drives things.  This is useful
if you need to find out the distribution meta-data (passed as
keyword args from 'script' to 'setup()', or the contents of the
config files or command-line.

'script_name' is a file that will be run with 'execfile()';
'sys.argv[0]' will be replaced with 'script' for the duration of the
call.  'script_args' is a list of strings; if supplied,
'sys.argv[1:]' will be replaced by 'script_args' for the duration of
the call.

'stop_after' tells 'setup()' when to stop processing; possible
values:
  init
    stop after the Distribution instance has been created and
    populated with the keyword arguments to 'setup()'
  config
    stop after config files have been parsed (and their data
    stored in the Distribution instance)
  commandline
    stop after the command-line ('sys.argv[1:]' or 'script_args')
    have been parsed (and the data stored in the Distribution)
  run [default]
    stop after all commands have been run (the same as if 'setup()'
    had been called in the usual way

Returns the Distribution instance, which provides all information
used to drive the Distutils.

USAGE

Value:

'''usage: %(script)s [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...] or: %(script)s --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...] or: %(script)s --help-commands or: %(script)s cmd --help '''

setup_keywords

Value:

('distclass', 'script_name', 'script_args', 'options', 'name', 'version', 'author', 'author_email', ...

extension_keywords

Value:

('name', 'sources', 'include_dirs', 'define_macros', 'undef_macros', 'library_dirs', 'libraries', 'runtime_library_dirs', ...