Gi, Gertjan Klein schrieb am 21.04.24 um 16:12:
I'd like to try a tiny change to the CDATA class. In order to try, I have to be able to build lxml. Unfortunately, on Windows.
Yeah, supporting Windows is everything but trivial due to the general lack of platform provided build support. Thus, all libraries have to do their own thing, and bringing that together is not easy. I'm happy myself that there is a working build setup at all. If it's a somewhat straightforward change that doesn't need tons of back-and-forth testing and debugging, and you have a github account, you could also use their CI service (Github Actions), either on your own account or in lxml's account via a pull request.
I've downloaded Visual Studio 2019 CE. I created a (Python 3.12) virtual environment, where I installed Cython (latest version). I cloned lxml sources from GitHub. I then opened a "Developer command prompt for VS 2019", activated the virtual environment, and typed:
(.venv) C:\Temp\lxml\lxml>python setup.py build_ext -i --with-cython --static-deps
This downloads the dependencies like libxml2 etc.; this goes without problems. Then compilation starts, and gives errors:
[...] Creating library build\temp.win32-cpython-312\Release\src\lxml\etree.cp312-win_amd64.lib and object build\temp.win32-cpython-312\Release\src\lxml\etree.cp312-win_amd64.exp etree.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _xmlStrchr etree.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _xmlIOParseDTD etree.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _xmlMemShow [...]
There are in total 503 unresolved externals. I checked the first one, and find that is is present in the downloaded libxml2_a.lib, but without the underscore. The directories of the downloaded libraries are correctly added to the compiler command line.
It might help to see the command line. Stefan