You can't. But is that possible with any programming language specific package manager? How would that even work given that every flavour of OS/distro have their own way of providing gfortran?

You can't. But my g'parent comment in this thread was because my Python module needs the OpenMP library, or compile-time detection that it wasn't there, to skip OpenMP support. The latter is done by an environment variable which my setup.py understands.

Then orf dreamed of a day where you could "describe what system libraries I may need without having to execute setup.py and find out, and express compile time flags."

The link you pointed doesn't appear to handle what we were talking about. By specifying "gfortran", I hoped to highlight that difference.

riff, building on nix, seems an intriguing solution for this.