Globs as Sources in Extension Modules

[codeandfire]

Hi,

I just noticed that while configuring extension modules with Setuptools, we cannot use glob patterns in the list of sources. Is this intentional?

For example, if we have a package like this

mypkg/
    foo.c
    bar.c
    setup.py

and then in setup.py:

from setuptools import setup, Extension

foobar_ext = Extension(
    name='foobar',
    sources=['*.c'])

setup(ext_modules=[foobar_ext])

Now if we run pip install . inside mypkg, this gives the following error:

running build_ext
building 'foobar' extension
gcc -Wno-unused-result -Wsign-compare -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O3 -pipe -fno-plt -fexceptions -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fstack-clash-protection -fcf-protection -flto=auto -ffat-lto-objects -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O3 -pipe -fno-plt -fexceptions -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fstack-clash-protection -fcf-protection -flto=auto -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O3 -pipe -fno-plt -fexceptions -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fstack-clash-protection -fcf-protection -flto=auto -fPIC -I/home/codeandfire/tmp/.venv/include -I/usr/include/python3.10 -c *.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-cpython-310/*.o
cc1: fatal error: *.c: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
error: command '/usr/bin/gcc' failed with exit code 1

and it seems this goes only when we explicitly list out the C source code files:

foobar_ext = Extension(
    name='foobar',
    sources=['foo.c', 'bar.c'])

Would like to understand this better. Thanks!

[abravalheri]

Hi @codeandfire, I am not familiar with this part of the code yet, but I think this is originally intentional.

Since right now to add extensions you need to use setup.py, the assumption might have been that if the user need to expand globs, they can do it themselves using the standard library.

In the future we might want to add extensions support to pyproject.toml, and then have globs expanded in the case of config via TOML, but I haven't arrived there yet...

[codeandfire]

Ah I see, thank you very much @abravalheri!