[Python-Dev] MS VC 7 offer

[Gerhard Häring]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, what is it that MSVC adds to the picture over gcc 
> anyway?  Has anybody ever tried making a MinGW-only build of Python on 
> Windows?

I'm working (as time and enthusiasm permits) on making this happen. For 
this project, I even got commit privileges by the powers that be :-)

Getting as far as:

C:\src\python\dist\src>python
'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
Python 2.3a2+ (#27, Apr 23 2003, 21:13:49)
[GCC 3.2.2 (mingw special 20030208-1)] on mingw32_nt-5.11
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>>

isn't much of a problem. This is a statically linked python.exe built 
with the autoconf-based build process, msys, mingw and my patches, 
mostly for posixmodule.c.

The difficult part is figuring out the autoconf stuff and distutils, so 
that the rest of the modules can be built. I didn't get very far on this 
side, yet :-/

<OT>
OTOH I'm pretty sure that a mingw build would be much easier if I just 
wrote my own Makefiles, but that's probably unlikely to ever be merged. 
At least that was my experience when making PostgreSQL's client code 
compile with mingw.

Their answer was "we don't want to maintain yet anothe set of 
proprietary Makefiles", which is a good argument.
</OT>

-- Gerhard