Building software in most languages is a pain. Remember ant build.xml, maven2 pom files, and multi-level makefiles?
Python has a simple solution for building modules, applications, and extensions called distutils. Disutils comes as part of the Python distribution so there are no other packages required.
Pull down just about any python source code and you’re more than likely going to find a setup.py script that helps make building and installing a snap. Most engineers don’t add functionality when using distutils, instead opting to use the default commands.
In some cases, developers might provide secondary scripts to do other tasks for building and testing outside of the setup script, but I believe that can lead to unnecessary complication of common tasks. » Read more
