Notes¶

sysconfig vs distutils.sysconfig¶

After installing CPython, two sysconfig modules are available:

sysconfig
distutils.sysconfig

A difference is the value associated with the EXT_SUFFIX and SO configuration variables.

		Linux	macOS	Windows
		CPython 2.7
SO	sysconfig	.so	.so	.pyd
SO	distutils.sysconfig	.so	.so	.pyd
EXT_SUFFIX	sysconfig	None	None	None
EXT_SUFFIX	distutils.sysconfig	None	None	None
		CPython >= 3.5
SO	sysconfig	.cpython-37m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so	.cpython-37m-darwin.so	.pyd
SO	distutils.sysconfig			.cp37-win_amd64.pyd
EXT_SUFFIX	sysconfig			.pyd
EXT_SUFFIX	distutils.sysconfig			.cp37-win_amd64.pyd

Note

The EXT_SUFFIX was introduced in Python 3.4 and is functionally equivalent to SO configuration variable. The SO configuration variable has been deprecated since Python 3.4.

Note

The information reported in the table have been collected execution the following python snippet.

def display_ext_suffix_config_var():
    import platform
    import sys
    import sysconfig
    from distutils import sysconfig as du_sysconfig
    details = (platform.python_implementation(),) + sys.version_info[:3]
    print("%s %s.%s.%s" % details)
    print(" SO")
    print("  sysconfig           : %s" % sysconfig.get_config_var('SO'))
    print("  distutils.sysconfig : %s" % du_sysconfig.get_config_var('SO'))
    print(" EXT_SUFFIX")
    print("  sysconfig           : %s" % sysconfig.get_config_var('EXT_SUFFIX'))
    print("  distutils.sysconfig : %s" % du_sysconfig.get_config_var('EXT_SUFFIX'))

display_ext_suffix_config_var()