28.1. distutils — Building and installing Python modules¶
The distutils package provides support for building and installing
additional modules into a Python installation. The new modules may be either
100%-pure Python, or may be extension modules written in C, or may be
collections of Python packages which include modules coded in both Python and C.
Most Python users will not want to use this module directly, but instead
use the cross-version tools maintained by the Python Packaging Authority. In
particular,
setuptools is an
enhanced alternative to distutils that provides:
- support for declaring project dependencies
- additional mechanisms for configuring which files to include in source releases (including plugins for integration with version control systems)
- the ability to declare project “entry points”, which can be used as the basis for application plugin systems
- the ability to automatically generate Windows command line executables at installation time rather than needing to prebuild them
- consistent behaviour across all supported Python versions
The recommended pip installer runs all
setup.py scripts with setuptools, even if the script itself only
imports distutils. Refer to the
Python Packaging User Guide for more
information.
For the benefits of packaging tool authors and users seeking a deeper
understanding of the details of the current packaging and distribution
system, the legacy distutils based user documentation and API
reference remain available: