cygwin+python+XML?

[Alex Martelli]

Has anybody managed to build expat (1.95.2 is the latest
release I can see on Sourceforge -- the zip I saw on the
expat's site itself seems to be a Win/VC++ only install?)
on a recent cygwin (I've just downloaded and installed it
on this old Win/NT box, and got the 2001-05-20 version of
Cygwin), so as to enable Python (2.1.1 is the version that
comes with Cygwin, from their contrib directories) to do
XML processing?  Building expat from sources fails midway
with a lot of undefined-reference errors for symbols of
the form __imp_*, and the reason for that is clear: expat.h
forces a __declspec(dllimport) on every symbol when it
finds __declspec is defined (clearly to accomodate VC++?),
but that's not how it has built the expat library.  I did
see a mention on Python's XML-SIG about having to use
DLEXPORT on all symbols, but I was hoping to avoid having
to patch the expat sources.

I do have a full working Python 2.1.1 for Win32/VC++6 on
the same disk where I'm trying to set up the Cygwin version,
in case any piece can be copied and reused (...but I sort
of doubt it...).  I just wanted to set up the cygwin
version too because sometimes I get help requests about
it, and it would be nice to have a complete working version
of Python -- complete with XML processing, Tkinter and
all -- on the cygwin side to answer such requests!


Alex