[Distutils] using distutils / setuptools on Windows (MinGW)

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 08:01 PM 12/19/2005 +0000, Paul Moore wrote:
>On 12/19/05, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> > At 04:59 PM 12/19/2005 +0100, Daniel Glöckner wrote:
> > FYI, the shortest path to using MinGW with distutils or setuptools is to
> > run this script and follow its directions:
> >
> > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-January/041676.html
> >
> > Once you've done that, the version of Python you ran it with will use the
> > MinGW compiler automatically for all building, with no '-cmingw32' 
> required.
>
>Actually, the referenced script just prints instructions on modifying
>distutils.cfg, it doesn't do it automatically.

That's why I said "run this script and follow its directions".  :)  The 
script builds libpython2X.a, which is the hard part for most earlier Python 
versions.


>As of Python 2.4, this is no longer needed - libpython24.a is shipped
>with the standard Python Windows installer (and yes, I mean all
>versions of Python 2.4 - memo to self, must upgrade home PC...)
>
>The distutils.cfg change is still needed if you want to make mingw the
>default - personally, I just use the command line flag
>--compiler=mingw32.

This can be abrreviated -cmingw32, of course, but if you use easy_install 
it's best to update the distutils.cfg, so that it will use that compiler by 
default.

Of course, if you have a setuptools-based project you can always do this once:

    setup.py build -cmingw32 saveopts -g

This will update distutils.cfg automatically after running the build, to 
save any options you used on the command line in the (-g) global 
configuration.  See the "saveopts" command in the setuptools manual for 
details.  (This is one of several setuptools commands that could probably 
be non-controversial additions to the official distutils: alias, rotate, 
saveopts, and setopt.)