- E02 - Support for MinGW Open Source Compiler

[Fredrik Lundh]

"Pat" wrote:

> A few things.  Primarily the fact that I'm not very experienced in C
> (the extensions that I need to have compiled are not written by me).
> Secondarily, the fact that the discussion threads I read made it seem
> much more complicated than what you just described.

from two posts at the top of this thread:

    "Writing a setup.py and running
        python setup.py build_ext --compiler=mingw32
    works for me *without* any more work. Things can't get much
    simpler."

and

    "The mingw compiler *is* supported through distutils. distutils
    can straightforwardly be configured to build extensions with
    mingw."

(now go read Ilias replies to those posts)

> Third, the fact that some of the code we've tried to compile didn't compile
> cleanly, the way your cElementTree did (but I can't remember what exactly
> the problem was and I didn't do the compiling).

was that code tested under gcc?  code that compiles under visual C doesn't
necessarily compile silently under gcc, but fixing that is usually pretty trivial
(no worse than porting mostly portable code between platforms).

> And, finally, an aversion to trial-and-error solutions.  I prefer to Google and
> ask questions when I'm out of my element.

sure didn't sound that way when you entered this thread:

    "So in an effort to make some headway, I'm going to try to summarize the
    current state of affairs.  The bottom line is that compiling C extension modules
    on the Windows platform for Python 2.4 is, today, a royal pain in the ass.
    Period.  Here's why. /.../"

now go download MinGW and figure out what's wrong with your C code.
if you get stuck, post the error messages, and I'm sure some c.l.pythoneer
will help you sort it out.

</F>