On 20/11/2007, Nick Coghlan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If someone already understands the rules for mixing CRT's and has a > reason to do it then more power to them (I do it at work all the time > due to toolset limitations). On the other hand, if someone doesn't > understand the restrictions, then it isn't our (or the c.l.p crowd's) > job to teach them.
I see this point, but as an end user of Python on Windows, all I want to do is download a binary, install it and use it. So I rely on packagers to produce these binaries. Before distutils supported mingw (something I put a fair bit of effort into) Windows binaries were relatively rare. Now they are the norm. I don't want to draw unwarranted conclusions, but I fear that without some free toolset being an option in distutils, the level of availability of Windows binaries will drop again. I'd be happy enough for the diistutils --compiler=mingw option to remain the "free" route, but if that means using msvcr71 (because mingw doesn't support msvcr 8 or 9) then it's not entirely fair to treat that configuration as "unsupported" - by all means, put qualifications on it (as Amaury did above), but if the code's there, it needs to be treated as a valid option. I'm NOT asking for some type of major commitment here - just that requests for help not be rejected with a comment of "you shouldn't be doing that" if we add distutils code to enable it. (Of course, if the consensus is that distutils should not support anything other than the commercial MSVC, I'll accept that and go and sulk in the corner, rehearsing my "I told you so" speech :-)) Paul. PS Just to clarify, the level of "mingw support" in current Python (2.5) includes: - The distutils --compiler=mingw support code - Inclusion of libpython25.a in the Windows MSI installer - The documentation in "Building Python Extensions" PPS I *will* see what the current status of msvcr8/9 support in the Mingw project is, but I'm not too hopeful - mingw is currently undergoing a change of maintainers and progress has slowed a lot. _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
