On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 3:57 PM, Carl Kleffner <cmkleffner@gmail.com> wrote:

Concerning the claims that mingw is difficult:

The mingwpy package is a sligthly modified mingw-w64 based gcc toolchain, that is in development. It is designed for simple use and for much better compatibility to the standard MSVC python builds. It should work out of the box, as long as the <Python>\Scripts folder is in the PATH.

Indeed, I tested it with 2.7.9 x86/x64, and wheres before I had to apply at least http://bugs.python.org/issue4709, and http://bugs.python.org/issue16472 and then generate the .a files to get it to work, this worked out of the box! (except of course still needing to change distutils.cfg).

I do wonder though, which may be slightly off topic here, whether putting the mingw binary stub files (?) in python/Scripts, rather than directly having python/shared/mingwpy/bin be on the path, is the best approach? I suppose it's no worse than having the other stuff in python/scripts on the path (although with e.g. pip you could do the python -m pip trick). Are there guidelines about this (using python/scripts) for Windows? I didn't see anything mentioned when python -m pip install ... vs. pip install is discussed.

Although I hope a 7z version of that mingw will be separately available for those that want to share a copy between versions of python, since the files in share/mingwpy is presumably the same between python versions for a specific bitness?

Matt