This is the plan for building Python under the MinGW Windows cross-compiler -- Richard W.M. Jones (rjones@redhat.com) 2008-12-11. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Originally we had envisaged only building Python 3. However because Python 3 is substantially incompatible with existing Python code and Python bindings to C libraries, this would have made this project less than useful for current Python code. The current plan is to maintain two sets of patches, to Python 2.6 and Python 3.x, keeping the patches as similar as possible, and getting them upstream quickly. This allows code to continue to be Python 2.x compatible, while providing an upgrade path to Python 3, and providing a reasonable way to get patches upstream and experiment with the bleeding edge Python 3. Note that Python 3 is not yet in Fedora, but we require a native Python binary is available in order to compile (otherwise the generated python.exe has to be run during the compile, but there are numerous problems with doing that in practice). Thus in order to build mingw32-python3, we also have to build our own native python3 "compatibility package" if you will. This is completely different from whatever Fedora will decide to do in future, and is not to be confused with the real Python 3 for Fedora. Once real Python 3 exists in Fedora, we can drop this compatibility package. In conclusion, the packages we are building are: In python/ subdirectory: mingw32-python Python 2.6 cross-compiled to Windows. In python3/ subdirectory: mingw32-python3 Python 3.x cross-compiled to Windows. python3 Fake Python 3 native package (we don't intend to ever release this, beyond MinGW developers). Current status ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mingw32-python (cross-compiled Python 2.6): Initial build. Contains no Fedora native patches yet. mingw32-python3: Initial build. python3: Fake package created.