Re: [Mingw-users] Fixing mingw support in Python's distutils

[Oscar B. <osc...@gm...>]

On 20 May 2013 14:13, Paul Moore <p.f...@gm...> wrote:
> On 20 May 2013 13:50, Earnie Boyd <ea...@us...> wrote:
>>
>> There is no need to confirm if removing -mno-cygwin will break
>> anything, we can assure you that it should not at least as far as
>> MinGW GCC is concerned.  We do not know if Python did anything special
>> because of it but I would doubt it.
>
>
> I think that the issue for Python (and if true, this is OT for the mingw
> list, obviously, I only post here to close the loop for people following the
> thread here) is that the distutils support for "building Python extensions
> using mingw" did not have a very clear picture of what constituted the mingw
> compiler and what constituted the cygwin one. (I may be wrong, as I wasn't
> around when the code was written, but that's how it looks to me). Keith
> alluded to the confusing cygwin situation earlier in the thread, so I guess
> you're aware of how people can get things muddled :-)
>
> So building an extension using --compiler=mingw in Python could pick up a
> cygwin gcc if that was on PATH, and this will work as long as -mno-cygwin is
> passed on the command line. But it won't work (it will build a DLL with a
> dependency on the cygwin DLL) if -mno-cygwin is omitted. I'd argue that
> people should just install and use mingw rather than cygwin, but that may
> not be what everyone does in practice.

Oh, okay. That seems a plausible explanation for the origin of this bug.

> The real problem here is that no-one knows if people actually try to build
> (native windows) Python extensions by installing Cygwin and using distutils
> with Cygwin's gcc on PATH. I suspect that some do, but they may not have
> been able to do so successfully for some years because of the runtime
> compatibility issues. That's essentially the OP's question, but maybe it
> needs directing at the cygwin folks.

I guess I'll still need go check what cygwin did with the option then.

Thanks to everyone here. I think I have all the information that is
needed concerning mingw.


Oscar