Python Library Win7 -64 Bit

[James Ravenscroft]

Dear All,

Before I start, I'm aware of how much of a nightmare MSys and MINGW are 
in comparison to UNIX/Linux environments, I'm a casual Ubuntu user 
myself and I wouldn't go near Windows if I didn't have to.

I'm trying to install the Python LibXML2 extensions onto my 64 bit 
Cython 2.6 setup under Windows 7. When I do a "python setup.py build -c 
mingw32",  everything starts off fine and the compilation begins. 
Distutils then returns complaining that most of the Python symbols (e.g. 
_imp_Py_NoneStruct and _imp_PyArg_ParseTuple) are undefined. This lead 
me to assume that the linker on my platform can't find a python library 
to link against. Sure enough, I looked through my build path and 
couldn't find libpython26.dll or libpython26.a anywhere. I managed to 
get hold of a libpython26 shared library file (I think I found it in my 
System32 folder) and copied it to C:\Python26\libs which is one of the 
directories on my gcc search path. However, I'm still getting the same 
rubbish about not all the python symbols being undefined.

Has anyone had any prior experience with this sort of problem or can 
anyone point me in the right direction? The only solution I could come 
up with was to compile python itself from scratch which, even on a high 
end desktop, takes hours and hours and hours... (etc) on an Msys setup.

Thanks,

James Ravenscroft
Funky Monkey Software
james (at) funkymonkeysoftware (dot) com