[Biopython-dev] Re: Work towards getting KDTree compiling

[Brad Chapman]

Hey all;

> > It works for me on Mandrake 9.2 (it also worked before, of course).
> > But I've noticed that in the first two steps gcc is still used instead of
> > g++.

Ah ha -- well spotted. 

> On OSF1 V5.1 it also used cc instead of cxx which means it doesn't work.
> 
> The reason for this is that the compiler_so attribute of the compiler
> object is always set to the C compiler. There is no compiler_cxx_so. I
> think this is a bug in distutils. 

Yeah, I'd say so as well -- it seems pretty pointless to only be
able to set the language for part of the compilation. I just went
back and looked again at what the behavior was when the language is
autodetected, and it is the same.

> I hope no one minds that I just checked in a "customization"
> (translation: slightly hacky workaround) to the build_ext_biopython
> class which fixed this on OSF1. Things still work for me on Redhat
> Linux 9 with the new setup.py.

Brilliant. It seems simple enough and only requires us to specify
the language as c++ for our included C++ code. +1 from me for keeping
this in the setup.py.

If people on disparate platforms could give this another test and
let me know if anything breaks that would be great. Especially like
to hear from the ol' Windows folks. For the record, it all works
fine for me on a FreeBSD machine with gcc (but we probably already
knew that :-).

Thanks for all the testing and thanks again for the patch Michael.
Brad