[Distutils] distutils & Cygwin compiler on Win32

[Greg Ward]

On 17 May 2000, Rene Liebscher (Rene.Liebscher@htw-dresden.de) said:
> did anyone ever try to use the Cygwin compiler on Win32 
> with distutils?
> 
> If not, then I'm the first.

Cool!  Looks like a good start, but it needs work.

First, I will never in a million years accept a patch that is mostly cut
'n pasted from existing source code.  Please, *please* take advantage of
OO techniques and *subclass* UnixCCompiler rather than copy it!  If
you're not sure how to do this, I'd be happy to help.  But it looks as
though a number of methods are straight copies of UnixCCompiler
methods... ie. they should just be inherited from UnixCCompiler.

Changing the compiler-selection code in ccompiler.py should not be
necessary; users can use the "--compiler" option to "build_ext" to
select an alternate compiler.  (That was added to support Borland's
compiler.)

I spotted an instance of spawning bash to do some sed and grep
trickery.  Ugh!  Please recode this as a Python function.  I wouldn't
even do this on Unix, much less Windows.

Why are large chunks of code wrapped in ''' ?  Is that a weird way of
commenting stuff out?  Please don't do that -- Python has a perfectly
good comment character.

Finally, has anyone submitted the config.h that works with Cygwin to
Guido?  I'm not sure how many people will be inclined to change Python's
config.h.  Send patches to patches@python.org.  I for one think it would
be great if Python 1.6 could build on Windows with something other than
MSVC, although I have no idea if this is a priority for Guido.

Oh, could someone explain to me the differences between cygwin and
mingw32?  I gather they both have something to do with using GCC and/or
other GNU tools on Windows, but that's all I know.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - nerd                                        gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
Do I have a lifestyle yet?