[Pkg-fonts-devel] Questions regarding a package that creates a python module (written in C)

[Jakub Wilk]

* Rogério Brito <rbrito at ime.usp.br>, 2010-05-26, 14:28:
>I am a newbie with Python (though I like the language) and I help
>maintain a package called fontforge, which is a font ("letters") editor
>that creates two modules [*] written in C so that some tasks with fonts
>can be performed en masse.
>
>Unfortunately, even when depending on python-dev-all (or whatever I
>should call it nowadays), I only get the modules created for python2.5
>and I would like (in principle, barring technical limitations) to
>provide such modules for any version of python that Debian supports,
>agnostically.

That's very nice of you. :)

>It is my understanding from the build system of fontforge that it only
>picks up python2.5 since it is the first version that is encountered.

Yes, most likely this is the case. I haven't seen any upstream build 
system that supports building/installing module for multiple Python 
version on its own initiative.

>With that said, what is the recommended course of action? Should I
>manually build the package twice in a row in debian/rules telling it
>first to configure with python 2.5 and then 2.6

Yes. Please don't hardcorde version numbers in debian/rules, however; 
use `pyversions -r` to query which Python versions are supported.

>or is there any solid, recommended approach to this problem (which I am 
>sure should appear in many other packages that provide python modules 
>written in C)?

For distutils-based build systems (i.e., not for fontforge), dh(1) 
builds modules for all supported Python versions (almost) out of the 
box. I'm sure that cdbs has a way to automatize this task, too (though I 
don't recommend cdbs to anyone).

-- 
Jakub Wilk
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