distutils now looks for the compiler version in sys.version, falling
back to MSVC 6 if the version isn't listed (Python 2.2 and lower).
Add helper routines for reading the registry. Refactor many
module functions into methods of the compiler to avoid passing
lots of state as arguments.
On cygwin, the setup.py script uses unixccompiler.py for compiling and linking
C extensions. The unixccompiler.py script assumes that executables do not get
special extensions, which makes sense for Unix. However, on Cygwin,
executables get an .exe extension.
This causes a problem during the configuration step (python setup.py config),
in which some temporary executables may be generated. As unixccompiler.py does
not know about the .exe extension, distutils fails to clean up after itself: it
does not remove _configtest.exe but tries to remove _configtest instead.
The attached patch to unixccompiler.py sets the correct exe_extension for
cygwin by checking if sys.platform is 'cygwin'. With this patch, distutils
cleans up after itself correctly.
Michiel de Hoon
University of Tokyo, Human Genome Center.
After some more reflection (and no negative feedback), I am reverting the
original patch and applying my version, cygwinccompiler.py-shared.diff,
instead.
My reasons are the following:
1. support for older toolchains is retained
2. support for new toolchains (i.e., ld -shared) is added
The goal of my approach is to avoid breaking older toolchains while adding
better support for newer ones.
The cygwinccompiler.get_versions() function only handles versions numbers of
the form "x.y.z". The attached patch enhances get_versions() to handle "x.y"
too (i.e., the ".z" is optional).
This change causes the unnecessary "--entry _DllMain@12" link option to be
suppressed for recent Cygwin and Mingw toolchains. Additionally, it directs
recent Mingw toolchains to use gcc instead of dllwrap during linking.
Currently, the cygwinccompiler.py compiler handling in
distutils is invoking the cygwin and mingw compilers
with the -static option.
Logically, this means that the linker should choose to
link to static libraries instead of shared/dynamically
linked libraries.
Current win32 binutils expect import libraries to have
a .dll.a suffix and static libraries to have .a suffix.
If -static is passed, it will skip the .dll.a
libraries. This is pain if one has a tree with both
static and dynamic libraries using this naming
convention, and wish to use the dynamic libraries.
The -static option being passed in distutils is to get
around a bug in old versions of binutils where it would
get confused when it found the DLLs themselves.
The decision to use static or shared libraries is site
or package specific, and should be left to the setup
script or to command line options.
specified with an absolute path, the object file is also
written to an absolute path. The patch drops the drive and
leading '/' from the source path, so a path like /path/to/foo.c
results in an object file like build/temp.i686linux/path/to/foo.o.
