[pony-build] extended command-line options for build scripts

[Jack Carlson]

On Feb 13, 2010, at 10:57 PM, C. Titus Brown wrote:

> 
> First: Is it appropriate to have Python-specific behavior specified on the
> command line?  Sure, pony-build is written in Python, and I'm planning to
> mainly use it to build Python packages, but just imagine if it becomes wildly
> successful and Ruby, Java, C++, etc people start to use it -- will we add a
> separate set of command-line flags to "standard" build scripts to allow
> language- or environment-specific settings to be passed in?
> 
> And can you think of any other ways to specify this kind of configuration
> detail?
> 

I guess I'd made the (incorrect) assumption that pony-build was looking for be more Python-specific--I'll have to think about this one and get back to you :-)

> Second, you have an awful lot of commented out lines of code in your
> commit.  What's with that?  Just get rid of code that you don't need any
> more; git can always retrieve old code.

There shouldn't be any commented out code in my latest commit?  I'd left some in the first couple commits (since they were incremental steps I wasn't too worried about getting everything perfectly clean) but I had intended for all that to be removed from the final commit, I'll go back and make sure it's all out though.

> Why not use subprocess instead of popen?

popen was the first function I found that did what I wanted--I'll look into subprocess as well, can't say I'd ever used either before though.  Is there any particular advantage to either that I should be aware of?

Thanks,

-Jack