distutils cygwin bdist_wininst

[Michiel Jan Laurens de Hoon]

I am trying to create a windows installer for my extension module using 
distutils. Before, I have created the setup.py, and this works 
beautifully on cygwin.

I would like to be able to distribute my extension as a Windows 
installer, so that users don't have to mess around with compilers they 
might not even have. If I try to make a windows installer on cygwin with

python setup.py bdist_wininst

I get the following error message:

....
distutils.errors.DistutilsPlatformError: distribution contains 
extensions and/or C libraries; must be compiled on a Windows 32 platform

If I try to run the same command with Python under Windows instead of 
Python on cygwin, then distutils tries to use the cl.exe compiler, which 
I don't have.

Is it possible to create a Windows installer with distutils using the 
Cygwin/mingw gcc compiler?


Thanks in advance.

Michiel de Hoon
University of Tokyo, Human Genome Center