[Tutor] compile

[David Ascher]

> Hi Max M. Stalnaker, you wrote on 6/1/99 12.45.19 AM:
> 
> > What you want to do is to "freeze" your program.  First thing to ask
> > yourself is "do you have MSVC++ 5.0?".  6.0 should work too.  If not,
> > then for our purposes, you cannot do it.
> 
> What about Cygwin? Or DJGPP? Mingw32? Not to mention the slew of
> commercial compilers. Is it possible to 'convert' the process to use
> another compiler? Is there any work in progress toward that? What about
> gcc, creating the program on *nix and compiling it for distribution in Win
> platforms? Many questions, any answers or pointers?

Cross-compilation isn't going to work -- it might be logically possible,
but it's so much work that it's just not doable.

Freezing with cygwin, djgpp or mingw32 might be more reasonable, but I
don't know that anyone has tried it.  The reason is simple -- the point of
freezing a program is to make installation easy on the user's machine.
Requiring those tools to be installed is not significantly simpler (in my
and other's experience) than requiring the user to run the Python binary
installer (it's what I do, and it works fine for most users).

There are alternatives as well, such as the "small distribution" by Gordon
McMillan, which I haven't investigated.

To get freezing to work with unix-like compilers, I'd suggest starting
from the Unix version of freeze.  I suspect that deep knowledge of the
various issues (relocatable DLLs, etc.) is helpful to get that project to
completion.  If you are successful, please let others know.

--david ascher