Question

I’m trying to use distutils with a Python module that contains extensions written in C. The program code is housed on a Linux server, but I sometimes upload changes from a Windows machine using the file transfer program WinSCP (editing is done in Notepad++). I’ve noticed that distutils often does not notice these changes in the C code (i.e. python setup.py build does not trigger gcc if the code was previously compiled). A check of the C source code on the server shows that it really has been updated correctly. On the other hand, changing the code directly on the server using a text editor like vim always causes python setup.py build to recompile the changed files. Any idea why uploading changed files might not cause distutils to recompile them?

Thanks.

EDIT:
After investigating this further I am noticing the same problem if I just create a plain C program with a Makefile. Thus this problem does not look like it is a distutils problem.

Answer 1

Looking into the source for distutils and seeing how it enforces rebuilds it looks like it checks timestamps of files to determine whether a file is out of date or not.

Can you make sure the timestamp is changing when winscp is uploading the file? Otherwise it looks like the build command has a “force” option that forces a rebuild no matter what.