Things we ought to do to improve our packaging

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 2013-08-08 06:37, Steve Borho wrote:
> One suggestion I have, if we try to automate this process in the
> hg/contrib folder, is that we make an attempt to drop the requirement on
> Microsoft's C compilers and try to use recent MinGW GCCs to compile the
> Explorer extension and the Mercurial (and other hg extension) Python
> extensions.

Why?

MSC is gratis and the standard C compiler on the Windows platform.

> We had problems with GCC some 5-6 years ago but perhaps
> those are all resolved now

..and in the mean time, "we" need a 64-bit C (C++) compiler.

The standard Windows platform is nowadays x64.

IIRC, last time I checked, there were still problems with MinGW for x64.
But it's been a while...

IIRC C-Python uses the MSC compiler as well for their Windows builds.