build curiosities of svn head (on WinXP)

[Steve Holden]

David Murmann wrote:
> hi all!
> 
> i just built revision 41809 under winxp using a rather uncommon
> setup (at least i think so). since i have no visual studio here,
> i only used freely available tools: cygwin to get the source, the
> microsoft compiler/linker and NAnt (nant.sf.net) as the build tool
> to interpret the .vcproj-files (which may be the uncommon part).
> 
Excellent!

> as far as i understand this setup is not supported in any way, but
> i noticed two problems, that could be interesting for others as well.
> 
> first, the ProjectGUID's in "pythoncore.vcproj" and "pcbuild.sln"
> mismatch, i fixed that locally by changing "pythoncore.vcproj"
> (maybe visual studio is ignoring/shadowing this problem?).
> 
That could be. I don't believe anyone who's doing any serious work on 
the Windows implementation is using anything other than Visual Studio (I 
seem to remember that a few copies were donated a while ago).

> second, the build order in "pcbuild.sln" for elementtree seems to be
> wrong, nant tried to build elementtree before pythoncore (which failed).
> i fixed this by building elementtree separately.
> 
Yes, the elementtree module is a new arrival for 3.5, so the build may 
not yet be perfectly specified. This is useful information.

> so my question is: will something like this be changed to support this
> setup (or at least to get the project files "cleaner")? should i submit
> a patch and see if it gets accepted?
> 
I suspect that the patch's chances of being accepted are much higher if 
its author will commit to providing ongoing support for it. At present 
the developers seem to feel that this is the only reliable way to 
incorporate a new platform (someone recently announced they had a 
working DOS implementation of 2.4, but there was some resistance to 
including it as a standard part of the build because of doubts about 
ongoing support).

> apart from that everything went fine, and i could reproduce the expected
> failure (ATM) of the regression test suite:
> 
>   http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/059033.html
> 
> btw, if anyone is interested in the (rather small) build-script for
> nant, just ask,
> 
> so long, David.

This is terrific news. Just recently there have been indications that 
the Windows platform needs a larger base of developers, and this might 
be just the thing to promote that. It might be worth a quick post to 
python-dev to see what interest your new development gets. Well done!

regards
  Steve
-- 
Steve Holden       +44 150 684 7255  +1 800 494 3119
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