Environment

• Pythonnet version: master bc5b084
• Python version: 3.8
• Operating System: Windows 10
• .NET Runtime: N/A

Details

• Describe what you were trying to get done.

I was trying to track down a bug in my code by breaking into pythonnet in Visual Studio. This necessitated a debug build. The setup.py appears to provide this option in the build_dotnet step through the --dotnet-config option. Unfortunately, this option is broken as currently implemented.

• What commands did you run to trigger this issue? If you can provide a
  Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example
  this will help us understand the issue.

$ python setup.py build_dotnet --dotnet-config=debug
usage: setup.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...]
   or: setup.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...]
   or: setup.py --help-commands
   or: setup.py cmd --help

error: option --dotnet-config must not have an argument

• If there was a crash, please include the traceback here.

See above.

• Solution

I was able to fix this by modifying setup.py:24-36 to

class build_dotnet(Command):
    """Build command for dotnet-cli based builds"""

    description = "Build DLLs with dotnet-cli"
    user_options = [
        ("dotnet-config=", None, "dotnet build configuration"),
        (
            "inplace",
            "i",
            "ignore build-lib and put compiled extensions into the source "
            + "directory alongside your pure Python modules",
        ),
    ]

The key is the = sign after the dotnet-config option.

With this change, the debug build proceeded correctly.

$ python setup.py build_dotnet --dotnet-config=debug
running build_dotnet
Running dotnet build...
C:\Program Files\dotnet\dotnet.exe build src/runtime/Python.Runtime.csproj --configuration debug --output C:\Code\pythonnet\build\lib\pythonnet/runtime