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

[C. Titus Brown]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 12:10:35PM -0500, Jack Carlson wrote:
> 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.

Right you are.

> > 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?

Yes.  Use subprocess, it's the Right Way.

(briefly: better long-term support, better cross-platform compat, and
subprocess is a superset of functionality.)

-titus
-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu