[Develop] building a windows build environment

[zooko]

Thanks for the report about setting up a Windows build environment,  
will.

For what it is worth, the wiki [1] is wrong when it says that  
"Microsoft Visual C++ 7.1 (2003) because it's the only compiler the  
official Win32 build of Python officially supports".  Python does not  
officially support any compiler, and the warning message that Python  
used to emit claiming that Visual C++ 7.1 is required has been fixed  
in recent builds of Python to claim that any compiler which produces  
compatible binaries is required.

I use cygwin gcc with the "-mno-cygwin" flag to build http:// 
allmydata.org -- a decentralized storage grid -- and it works fine.   
You just have to put "compiler=mingw32" in your distutils config  
file, as described in our README.win32 [2].

I haven't yet attempted to build Miro.

Regards,

Zooko

[1] https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/ 
BuildingMiroWithMinGW
[2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/README.win32