[Distutils] add new compiler to distutils

[patrick flaherty]

Hi,

Relatively new to python (and very new to distutils) but experienced 
programmer.

I'm trying to do a 64 bit build of 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyopenssl/

I'm on Windows Server 2008 R2.  First had to acquaint myself with 
mingw32.  That built but the DLLs (or rather PYDs) that are created 
won't load at runtime.  I transferred the build to a 32 bit machine; the 
PYDs loaded; and the program ran successfully.  Thus, as I said, I'm 
looking to rebuild in 64 bits.

It's seems that there's a 64 bit version of mingw in development on 
sourceforge:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64.  You download a 
toolchain; add that to your Windows PATH;  and I'm able to build a 
sample hello.c successfully.

The problem is with Python and setup.py.  When I try to specify compiler 
i86_64-mingw32 or some variant to setup.py, I get the following:

> L:\pf\Python\pyOpenSSL>setup.py build_ext -Ic:\openssl\include -c 
> x86_64-pc-mingw32
> running build_ext
> error: don't know how to compile C/C++ code on platform 'nt' with 
> 'x86_64-pc-mingw32' compiler
So after fumbling around a bit, where I've arrived at is that in the 
distutils package ( c:\python26\lib\distutils ) there are various files 
such as msvccompiler.py, msvccompiler9.py (I have VS 2008 installed), 
ccompiler.py and cygwincompiler.py that would seem to indicate that 
'new' compilers have to have support built into distutils.

Is this correct, and if so, how does one go about the task of adding a 
new compiler?

thanx - pat