Dulwich C extensions and stand-alone Windows installation of bzr

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2011 09:10:05 +0200
> From: John Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com>
> Cc: bazaar at lists.canonical.com, mbp at canonical.com, 
> 	"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org>
> 
> I think it is reasonable that if you want to *build* a package, then you
> need to have the build tools, such as a compiler and standalone python.

But Python itself is not used to build the shared library of dulwich C
code (except to run some magic compilation commands that could be
easily typed by hand).  The build process needs only the header files
that come with Python, AFAIU.  And I already have a C compiler that is
in perfect working order; I use it every day.

Let me put it another way.  There are 3 C files in dulwich.  Normally,
to make a DLL from them would be a 15-second job, even if I had to
type the compilation/link command by hand.  All I need is a few
sentences of instructions in some README and a few header files.
Instead, I need to install the exact version of Python used to produce
the bzr I have, or maybe switch to using Python-based bzr
installation, and then go figure out myself how to compile with GCC
instead of MSVC.  IOW, the changes to my workflows and the amount of
effort needed are very large for such a simple and basic job.  So I'm
afraid I'm going to disagree that this is "reasonable", at least in
this particular case.

In yet other words, the dulwich setup procedure clearly assumes that
the bzr installation is Python based, and thus the standalone
installation on Windows is barely supported by bzr-git (so much so
that Jelmer originally didn't even understand how I could install
dulwich without running setup.py).

> I think pre-built packages for dulwich and bzr-git could be made
> without requiring them to be part of the standard windows
> installer. That said, somebody would have to do it, and so far
> nobody has done so.

I would very much appreciate if someone did.  I couldn't myself, as
installing MSVC is not an option for me.