Dulwich C extensions and stand-alone Windows installation of bzr

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org>
> Cc: Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com>,
>     bazaar at lists.canonical.com
> Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2011 13:05:05 +0900
> 
> I don't recall any traffic on python-devel regarding building Python
> with non-MS toolchains, except for the occasional statement that it's
> possible (maybe even supported in some sense).  The PSF and Active
> State Python installers are built with MS tools, and I would guess
> that the great majority of Windows installs are one of those two.  It
> would be asking for trouble for Python-based projects to distribute
> extension binaries built with third-party toolchains.  I suppose there
> are very few Python-based projects that do so, in or out of GNU.
> 
> So your best bet is FS advocates who also use Python a lot, and c.l.py
> is most likely where you'll find them.  HTH

Thanks.  There are a few pages floating around that explain how to use
MinGW, but they all describe how to tweak distutils to invoke MinGW
rather than MSVC.  That requires to have Python installed, so this is
not what I'm looking for.

This comes the closest to what I need:

  http://docs.python.org/extending/windows.html#using-dlls-in-practice

although it uses MSVC.  But "translation" to MinGW is simple.  The
example indicates that the Python include directory and import library
are needed, even for such manual techniques...

So it looks like having such extension as part of the standalone
installer is the only practical way that doesn't require a Python
installation.