Phillip J. Eby wrote:
It looks like the error occurs when an MSVCCompiler instance is created; I haven't yet figured out *why* such an instance is being created. I don't have 2.3 installed on Win32, so as an experiment, I added a 'raise' statement to 2.2's MSVCCompiler. If I specified compilation with msvc, I get the error I raised. If I specify mingw32, I don't. So, evidently 2.2's distutils don't create an MSVCCompiler instance when specifying mingw32. I can't fathom why 2.3 would do so.
Well, I figured out why. This was a bug in Twisted's setup.py, which has a function _check_header that is supposed to invoke the compiler on a tiny test module to make sure the module being built will build successfully. The new compiler is constructed with new_compiler(), but no arguments were passed to it; it was this invocation that fails with the error message I was getting. This bug was introduced some time ago; I'm not sure why I didn't see it before now. Using self.compiler instead worked (there's no need to call new_compiler() when it's already been done for you). C