Earlier this month, Tim P. wrote:
Semi-unfortunately, the author of that [bzip2] has
no idea if it actually works on 95/98/ME/NT/XP
and in the docs for "3.8 Making a Windows DLL"
I haven't tried any of this stuff myself, but it all looks plausible.
That means it will require some real work to build and test this stuff on 6 flavors of Windows. Not a showstopper, but does raise the bar for getting into the PLabs Windows distro.
Tim & I have different beliefs here. Tim believes that if something works on one flavor of Windows, that says nonthing about the other flavors. I believe that when it works on one flavor, you can assume that it works on all, unless proof to the contrary is shown. I'm sure we both have experience to back this up. :-)
Sorry if I'm way off base here, but does the underlying bzip2 package have to be in a DLL, or can't that be built as a static library, which gets linked into the .pyd, which *is* a DLL? In either case, it doesn't seem like it would be very difficult to create whatever flavor library is needed. The code for bzip2 seems to be very portably written.
The python-bz2 code, on the other hand, needed a little bit of tweaking to make it compile with Microsoft's compiler.
I'll be happy to help in whatever way would be useful in dealing with the "raised bar," as the prospect of having Python support on all platforms for bz2 compression (and tarfiles) is very appealing.
If you could get Python from CVS, build it with MSVC 6.0 for Windows (elaborate instructions are in PCBuild/readme.txt!!!), and see if the bz2 module works on all flavors of Windows to which you have access, that would be tremendously helpful IMO. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)