This is the plan for building Python under the MinGW Windows
cross-compiler -- Richard W.M. Jones (rjones@redhat.com) 2008-12-11.
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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
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mingw32-python (cross-compiled Python 2.6): Initial build.  Contains
no Fedora native patches yet.

mingw32-python3: Initial build.

python3: Fake package created.