Dulwich C extensions and stand-alone Windows installation of bzr

[Martin Pool]

On 4 September 2011 15:52, Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu.org> wrote:
> See https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr-git/+bug/839483 for the background.

Tangentially to this, I learned recently about
<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/faulthandler/>, which is builtin in
python3.3 but also available separately for 2.x.  We could possibly
ship it in the Windows pre-built installers to get better tracebacks
in this sort of case.  (I'm not totally sure it would have handled
this particular error but I think so.)

> It turns out that there's no documented way of installing Dulwich with
> C extensions on MS-Windows where bzr was installed with the
> stand-alone installer.

In general it seems like the standalone installer just tends to be
very self-contained - there are other bugs about the difficulties of
getting it to run other modules.

Perhaps we could just bundle bzr-git and dulwich in the installers?

> Not only that, the fact that I need MSVC is in itself a problem: it's
> a proprietary tool.  I use MinGW GCC.  (I'm surprised MSVC is used to
> build binaries of a GNU project.)

I think the short story is that Python on Windows strongly prefers
msvc so we build with that too.  It is certainly not desirable either
theoretically or practically but it seems the best tradeoff given
we're supporting a proprietary platform in the first place.

m