Upstream to CFFI?

[ngoldbaum]

This is really neat and is exactly what I was looking to put together to document how to do CFFI builds with meson-python. My personal goal is to make it easier for people who maintain extensions that use CFFI and want to support the new abi3t limited API defined by PEP 803 to do so without waiting for setuptools to do its next release. I'm also a big fan of meson-python.

My goal was to update the CFFI docs to document the workflow outlined here, but it seems like that would be massively duplicative. While writing this, I came across python-cffi/cffi#47, which I guess explains why this is in its own repository.

How do you feel about me opening a CFFI PR that tests CFFI itself against your project and updates this page in the CFFI docs to explain how to use this package? I wouldn't want to steer all the eyeballs reading that documentation this way if you don't want that.

I'm a little bit more optimistic about getting documentation and test improvements merged into CFFI after successfully getting free-threaded Python support shipped last year.

Let me know what you think.

[inklesspen]

I would honestly be perfectly happy to merge this tool into the cffi package; its only dependency is cffi, and while it currently uses meson-python as a build backend, it's pure-python and could build just as well with flit or uv_build (or, sigh, setuptools).

It's really only about a hundred lines of code and could easily be made a command-line script in cffi.

That being said, you may of course reference this tool in the docs, but you must understand this is one of many hobby projects and I make no promises of responsiveness to any feature requests.

[ngoldbaum]

I would honestly be perfectly happy to merge this tool into the cffi package

I think I'd like to try this first. Let's see if the CFFI maintainers can be persuaded to include the script into CFFI itself.

[inklesspen]

https://github.com/inklesspen/cffi-buildtool/blob/main/src/cffi_buildtool/gen.py has some utility functions which should probably get put somewhere in the main cffi library; in particular _execfile is extremely similar to cffi.setuptools_ext.execfile except that it doesn't perform file IO directly.

and then https://github.com/inklesspen/cffi-buildtool/blob/main/src/cffi_buildtool/cli.py is an extremely straightforward CLI script which uses those utility functions.