Paul Moore added the comment:

Ruben,
Thanks for the detailed explanations. Just to be clear, I am *not* the person 
that will take this aspect of the process forward - that will be the community 
of people building (or wanting to build) extensions for Python with mingw. I 
don't know if that community has a spokesperson yet (or even if it's a 
well-defined "community") but they would be the ones to to engage with the 
mingw developers.

In particular, the choices around ABI incompatible variants that you mention 
are precisely the sort of thing the community needs to establish - which 
variant is compatible with Python, how to get a maintained build of that 
variant (there seems to be a lot of "get such-and-such's personal build from 
this URL" in the current crop of instructions for building Python extensions 
with mingw - that's not really sustainable).

The problem boils down to there needing to be a definitive, simple, and 
maintained set of instructions and software for "how to set up a mingw build 
environment for Python extensions". The core Python developers can't provide 
that (as we use MSVC). What we can do, when such a thing exists, is look at 
whether it's a toolchain that we can reasonably support.

At the moment mingw patch requests come in based on someone's custom build 
environment, that we can't easily reproduce, and we can't be sure is the same 
as anyone else's. That's not something we can support - hence the frustration 
from the mingw-using community, because we have partial support from the days 
when mingw.org and cygwin were the only two options for gcc-on-windows and we 
didn't really communicate the change in status (which admittedly would have 
been "we no longer support mingw", so wouldn't have helped much...)

Hopefully, the discussion on this issue clarifies the position a bit. Give us a 
well-defined "gcc on Windows" (mingw) platform definition, and we'll look at 
supporting it. Otherwise, we can maintain the status quo (what's there remains, 
but patches pretty much never go in, because reproducing issues and testing 
changes is too much effort to be viable) or formally drop support for mingw 
(which I'd be reluctant to do, but it may be worth it just to offer clarity).

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue4709>
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