no ./configure script

[Martin Pool]

Bazaar is a GNU program and the GNU standards <http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Managing-Releases> call for a shell script called 'configure' that controls some aspects of compilation and installation. That page of the spec defines the minimum interface

We still want the main build to be done by distutils/setup.py because that's the standard for Python and it embeds a lot of knowledge about how to build Python programs that we don't want to duplicate.

This bug could potentially be solved by someone writing a general-purpose GNU configure->setup.py mapping.

This bug is of questionable value because we haven't actually had any user reports yet that people are hitting this. Most people install bzr through a binary package or OS package manager, and they already have infrastructure for handling Python.

Doing this should not block people from running plain setup.py on systems that can't run configure scripts.

One way to handle this would be to use autoconf to produce a Makefile.config sourced by the real Makefile, that then passes the options down to setup.py. There may be some imperfections in mapping all the configure variables to setup.py but probably some could be handled.