[Zope3-dev] Re: RFC: zopeproject

[Hanno Schlichting]

Hi,

Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> On 18 Jul 2007, at 19:25 , Kent Tenney wrote:
>> on my W2K machine
>>> zopeproject MyZopeProject
>>
>> fails because I don't have Visual Studio installed and it wants
>> to compile extensions for ZODB
> 
> Right. Something seems to depend on ZODB 3.9.0-xyz now and we have no
> binary for that (yet). Sadly enough, I recently asked Jim to make
> Windows eggs and they've all become useless because at least half of the
> packages now have newer releases (which buildout insists on using).
> 
>> I've heard that mingw can substitute, but I've never succeeded in
>> configuring it.

Have you seen my instructions for a Plone 3.0 buildout at
http://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/ploneout/trunk/WINDOWS.txt ? This is the
most reliable and easiest way I could find to compile C extensions on
Windows without having to have any special M$ compiler.

> Well, I managed to install it (you need cygwin, then install the
> gcc-mingw-core package from the 'devel' section). And with 'python
> setup.py build -c mingw32', it seems I can even build Windows eggs,
> though I can't get them to work. I get some a DLL error ("Access denied.")
> 
> What's more, there seems to be now way to tell zc.buildout to pass the
> '-c mingw32' option to setup.py when building eggs.

My instructions tell you to use MinGW directly without all that Cygwin
junk which only tends to make things more complicated and often
introduces an undesired runtime dependency on Cygwin. The nice thing as
noted in my howto is that you can change a distutils option to say all
build commands should use mingw32 and so all buildout recipes will pick
this up.

> I wonder, if done correctly (and I believe some people, e.g. Andreas
> Jung, have managed to get mingw to build binary eggs for them), are
> mingw-based eggs any worse than Visual C ones?

A few years ago, MinGW (the native port is still based on GCC 3.4)
compiled C extensions were a bit slower than those compiled with Visual
C. But I haven't tried this in recent years.

My knowledge of C compilation is too limited to judge if there are some
hidden pitfalls here, though.

Hanno