Windows Debugging w/o MS

[Christopher Anderson]

Hello all. I have a fairly fundamental question that I have been
googling like crazy, but I can only seem to find really outdated or
unreliable info:

I am trying to build an extension module written in C++ on windows XP.
I am trying to use only open-source tools, such as mingw. I'm using
the Python 2.5 official, and it seems to compile my module just fine
(I'm using the --compiler=mingw32). I can also import the module. The
problem is, when I attempt to use it, I get a segfault. Now, I'm
pretty sure this segfault is just a bug in my C++ code. So of course,
I would like to debug this thing somehow. I tried using the mingw gdb
giving it my python.exe to run, but obviously this python has no debug
info, and wasn't even compiled with mingw. I was hoping it would still
somehow debug my extension module right, but when I do a backtrace
after it segfaults, I get nothing useful.

I've tried compiling python from source, and my extension module,
using MSVC8 (free express version), and I managed to get this to work.
The thing is, I don't want to have to recompile every single python
package I need (wxPython, SciPy, etc).

So basically, I need some general advice for how to compile and debug
extension modules on windows using only open-source tools. I am still
amazed that MSVC7.1 was chosen for the official python release and not
mingw, has anyone explained this?

Thank you so much for your time,
Chris Anderson