hi folks, i promised i'd get python built under wine - and i'm happy to report that this goal has been successfully achieved. http://bugs.python.org/issue4954 if anyone's interested. what has been achieved is that a python.exe, libpython2.5.dll, an implib libpython2.5.dll.a and a python2.5.def have all been successfully created using an entirely free software toolchain, along with the dynamic libraries (such as pyexpat.pyd - python for win32's convention is .pyd not .so). running the regression testing has been... interesting :) several bugs in wine have been detected, along with faults in the header-files that need to be corrected. tmpfile() is faulty; MAX_LONG and MIN_INT #defines cause problems; the default file format CRLF instead of LF causes the builtin regression test to fail; _ctypes _utterly_ borks on c structure creation and manipulation but is using assembly-stuff (a copy of libffi is included in python) - there are a few more, but out of 350 tests, the majority of them succeed. amazingly. anyway, the point of this message is primarily to let people know that this successful compile shows just how far along wine is coming, and it's like a really big hairy deal that python can now be compiled for win32 platforms, for native use on windows or on wine, _without_ having to have a proprietary operating system or a proprietary compiler to do it. now it's possible to port things like pygtk2, pyqt4, pywebkit-gtk and numpy to win32 etc. (because of the header files and the implibs) - again, _without_ requiring proprietary technology. which is absolutely fantastic. thank you to everyone on the wine team. l.
