[Distutils] The Wheel specification and compatibility tags on Windows

[Paul Moore]

On 28 February 2013 00:46, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I apologise if I have misunderstood as I don't understand these things
> that well. But as someone who uses mingw on Windows (when I am on
> Windows) I have a question. What if I build with mingw on my computer
> and then upload to PyPI? Is it guaranteed that if my built version is
> compatible with standard MSVC-compiled Python x.y on my Windows
> machine then it also compatible with (standard) Python x.y on other
> Windows machines.

Yes. Unless you build your own Python *interpreter* with a different
compiler, you should have no issues.

> Perhaps not relevant but currently building extensions with mingw
> requires patching distutils (It's been a while since I actually did
> this because it's already done on all my computers but the bug for it
> is here http://bugs.python.org/issue12641).

Yes, that is relevant, to the extent that distutils is what sets the
flags for mingw to ensure a compatible C runtime. If you patch
distutils, you run the risk of breaking that (it's the -lmsvcrXX flag
that matters). The patch you refer to will not cause issues, though.

Paul