cross-compile Windows installer(s) on OS X or Linux about expak HOT 4 CLOSED

So the difference in the above errors is probably because the virtualenv has setuptools 0.9.8, and the "real" environment has setuptools 1.3.2.

Upgrading to setuptools 1.4 gets further. This looks promising:

python setup.py bdist_wininst -p win32

It does print this warning:

Warning: Can't read registry to find the necessary compiler setting
Make sure that Python modules _winreg, win32api or win32con are installed.
removing 'build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/wininst' (and everything under it)

...but I think I can ignore that for a pure Python module with no C code to compile.

Next steps: bring the generated installer over to a Windows system, check to see if it really is a win32 exe, check that it installs and works for both 2.6 and 2.7 (for issue #3).

from expak.

The installer seems to be good, but it can't find Python 2.6 in the registry. Only 2.7.

2.7 has its registry entries under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, while 2.6 is under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, so I imagine that difference is the issue.

This seems to be a limitation of the installer program that is bundled when specifying "-p win32", when the bdist is built either on OS X or on Win 7. I just tried the default platform win-amd64 on Win 7, and that generates an installer that can see both 2.6 and 2.7. I wouldn't be surprised if the same would be true for the OS X cross-compile. However, it's a 64-bit installer. Which is probably fine as a limitation -- who still runs 32-bit Windows?***** -- but it's kind of annoying when installing a pure Python module.

(Although the install does also create simple_expak.exe at some point. I don't yet know how that is done, but the 32-bit installer seems to create a 64-bit simple_expak.exe that works just fine.)

SO MUCH FUN. For minimal headaches/surprises the answer may be to generate both a 32-bit and 64-bit installer.

***** answer: probably a significant overlap with people who still mess around with Quake

from expak.

As the cherry on top, the OS X cross-compile can only do win32, not win-amd64. Choosing "-p win-amd64" results in:

error: /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/distutils/command/wininst-6.0-amd64.exe: No such file or directory

I think the code that generates that "6.0" is goofed up for non-Windows versions of Python though. It comes from distutils.msvccompiler.get_build_version, which looks for the "MSC v." substring in sys.version, which isn't present in OS X Python (because it was built with gcc). Since it doesn't find it, it assumes MSVC version 6 was used to build this Python, which it then assumes is relevant for the target system. This error may not matter at all for a pure Python module installer, and I could work around it by moving/renaming the wininst files in my Python installation. But it's kind of a worrisome error, like... what else is off-kilter in this process?

Edit: another workaround would be to override distutils.msvccompiler.get_build_version in setup.py.

from expak.

Handled by commit 705cc59.

from expak.