[Python-Dev] Re: Switching to VC.NET 2003

[Paul Moore]

"Phillip J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com> writes:

> The rest is handled by the distutils, pretty much.  I don't think
> there's actually any direct linking to the MS VC runtime, anyway, if
> one is only using Python API calls.  But I guess I'll find out.

One thing that I imagine does need looking at is modifying distutils
to check whether Python was built with VC7.1, and if so add a
-lmsvcr71 flag to the gcc command line when compiling with mingw. This
can be hacked by hand, but only at the expense of making setup.py
version-specific (or doing your own test in setup.py).

I don't know if Martin has already done this, but it needs doing. I'm
not a distutils expert, but I am willing to look at it in the longer
term.

BTW, on another note, which 3rd party package developers have access
to MSVC7.1, or can build with Mingw? Has anyone surveyed this? I, for
one, have installed the following packages which have extension
modules involved:

    cx_Oracle
    mxBase
    PIL
    pygame (not used much)
    win32all
    twisted
    wxPython
    pyXML
    Metakit

If there wasn't a Windows binary version for 2.4 produced, this would
cause me problems.

At the very least, I'd suggest a warning post on c.l.p and
c.l.p.announce, something to the effect of "Python 2.4 will be built
with MSVC 7.1. Extension developers supplying binary distributions for
Windows will need some way of building MSVC 7.1 compatible modules
(MSVC 7.1 itself, or a recent version of the free Mingw compiler
package) to continue providing binries."

Paul.
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