2.2 Splitting the job up

Running setup.py install builds and installs all modules in one fell swoop. If you prefer to work incrementally--especially useful if you want to customize the build process, or if things are going wrong--you can use the setup script to do one thing at a time. This is particularly helpful when the build and install will be done by different users--e.g., you might want to build a module distribution and hand it off to a system administrator for installation (or do it yourself, with super-user privileges).

For example, you can build everything in one step, and then install everything in a second step, by invoking the setup script twice:

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

(If you do this, you will notice that running the install command first runs the build command, which quickly notices that it has nothing to do, since everything in the build directory is up-to-date.)

** concrete reason for splitting things up? **

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