Building Blocks as simple as possible, but no simpler

Installing PyAMF 0.4.0rc1 on Windows XP

I wanted to give the latest pyamf a go, but when I used the standard 'setup.py install', the following ominous warning was presented:

error: Python was built with Visual Studio 2003;
extensions must be built with a compiler than can generate compatible binaries.
Visual Studio 2003 was not found on this system. If you have Cygwin installed,
you can try compiling with MingW32, by passing "-c mingw32" to setup.py.

Uh oh! I actually DO have Cygwin installed, but unfortunately this message is a default and not entirely helpful. It did put me on the right path to actually getting it to go.

This webpage has a lot of good information on the subject, and it is where I pulled out these steps:

1. Grab the MingW32 Automated Installer and get it installed. I selected all of the available options as I figured it wouldn't hurt (it didn't)

2. Add the mingw32 binaries to your system path environmental variable (ie c:\mingw32\bin)

3. Tell Python to use mingw32 when it needs to compile a distribution by adding a file called distutils.cfg in this folder: {PYTHON_INSTALL}\lib\distutils\distutils.cfg. The file should contain:

[build]
compiler = mingw32

4. Version number parsing was throwing errors, so you actually have to edit {PYTHON_INSTALL}\lib\distutils\version.py to get it compiled. At line 100 make the following change:

from:

1
2

    version_re = re.compile(r'^(\d+) \. (\d+) (\. (\d+))? ([ab](\d+))?$',
                        re.VERBOSE)

to:

1
2

    version_re = re.compile(r'^(\d+) \. (\d+) (\. (\d+))? (\. (\d+))?$',
                            re.VERBOSE)

now with all that done, just run 'setup.py install' and it should compile as expected. Easy as... I dunno, it is actually kind of confusing, but it works and now I can give pyamf a whirl with the c-ext enabled.