Mark Bucciarelli wrote:

> On Thursday 17 July 2003 6:27 pm, Neil Schemenauer wrote:
>
>>On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 06:08:14PM -0400, Mark Bucciarelli wrote:
>>
>>>When I run setup.py install on Windows, I get an error that
>>>cl.exe cannot be found.  (cl.exe is the name of the windows C
>>>compiler.)
>>
>>You need to comment out the line:
>>
>>    kw['ext_modules'].append(htmltext)
>
>
> easy enuf.
>
>
>>in setup.py.  Perhaps we should change it so the default it to not
>>compile _c_htmltext on Windows.
>
>
> +1
>
> Couldn't setup.py also branch based on the platform?
>

I suggest the patch to setup.py I just posted in another message: fail over to
Python implementation, only if compilation fails. That way, Windows users who
*do* have a compiler don't lose out.

>>>If this is the correct behavior, how can I build an installer for
>>>Windows users that don't have cl.exe?

If you're distributing an app to Windows users, you could always build the .pyd
yourself and include it in your distro.

>>BTW,  I've heard that Microsoft's C++ command line tools are free
>>to download.
>
>
> free as in beer ... not as in market.  ;-)

I'm really impressed with the MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows) toolchain,
which compiles against msvcrt.dll (i.e. doesn't need extra DLLs at runtime,
like Cygwin-created execuatables do). And it works great with distutils.

-- Graham