setuptools

setup.py

Traditionally distutils has been used, and setuptools ended up having its own internal copy. A lot of effort has been put into coping with the deprecation of distutils and accomodating setuptools. Furthermore, setup.py will also be discontinued and we will probably have to move on to setuptools.build_meta or find another way to package wheels and perform CMake builds.

NEURON has several Python extensions

  • HOC module (setuptools Extension with our CMake sauce on top)

  • three Rx3D extensions (Cython extensions)

  • MUSIC (Cython extension)

Operational Modes

We use setup.py in two operational modes :

  1. wheel building It boils down to

     setup.py build_ext bdist_wheel

    We configure the HOC extension along with a CMake configure, build all extensios and collect them for the wheel. This is called via build_wheels.bash.

  2. CMake build It boils down to

     setup.py build_ext build

    We provide the cmake build folder, in this mode we do not run CMake configure, we build all extensions and make sure they are integrated into the CMake build and install. This is called via CMake in src/nrnpython/CMakeLists.txt by passing –cmake-build-dir (the folder where we configured NEURON with CMake), along with other CMake options.

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