Installing PyCharm on Windows

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 12/20/2015 4:54 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>
>> Want to run CPython 3.6 on Windows?
>> Go hunt down a compiler, fiddle around with it, and see if
>>
>> you can get everything to work.
>
>
> No, much easier. Essentially the same steps as below after
> following the instructions in the devguide to get the 2015 compiler.
>
>> Want to run CPython 3.6 on a Debian system? It's probably as simple as:
>
>
>> $ sudo apt-get build-dep python3
>
>
> I think the equivalent step for windows come later.
>
>> $ sudo apt-get install mercurial
>
>
> OK, harder, hunt for Windows hg installer, or TortoiseHg if one likes GUIs
> front ends as I do.  Also get svn.
>
>> $ hg clone https://hg.python.org/cpython
>
>
> Essentially same.
>
>> $ cd cpython
>
>
> cd cpython/pcbuild
>
>> $ make
>
>
> external.bat # for dependencies, which is where svn is needed.
>
> I forget command line invocation to build python itself.  I use Explorer and
> doubleclick python?.sln and the file association starts Visual Studio..
> There is a windows make.bat for doc building.  This all works much better
> than a few years ago.  Many thanks for final tweaks to Zach Ware.

Ah, okay. My information is several years old, as that was the last
time I tried a build. Glad that's been improved on; although there's
still the problem that the Debian steps are virtually the same as for
any other project (just hunt down the source control URL for the
project - "git clone git://pike-git.lysator.liu.se/pike.git", or "git
clone https://github.com/micropython/micropython", etc, and all the
other steps are the same), whereas you need to follow a specific
Windows CPython guide. Still, that's a gigantic improvement. Thanks
for clarifying.

>> Want to try out that interesting-looking patch off the bug tracker?
>> Same as the above, plus one little 'patch' command to apply the patch.
>
>
> Ditto for Windows.

Right. That's part of the CPython openness, rather than the Debian
openness, so that part is just as easy on Windows (once you have a
build env set up on each platform).

>> I'm not going to force anyone to abandon Windows, but freedom does
>> benefit even people who don't directly exercise it, so I would still
>> encourage people to consider a culture of freedom.
>
>
> We have free-as-in-beer Python on Windows *because* people were free, in
> both senses, to develop it on *nix.

Exactly, and a strong example. Back when I maintained several Windows
systems around the house (a dwindling number over the years,
fortunately), I tended to deploy as much cross-platform open source
software as I could. Music player? VLC. CD burning? cdrtools. Etc,
etc, etc. Partly because it's good software... partly because it's the
*same* good software as I'm using on other platforms. And possible
only because of that freedom. Sure, I didn't *compile* any of them - I
just took binary blobs - but it was still much better to use free
software.

ChrisA