> I guess that I don't understand why you feel there is so much effort > involved. I developed a set of makefiles that build Python and all > dependencies from the command line using nmake. The only thing you > have to do is specify debug and cpu. The rest is taken care of by the > Makefiles. Of course, this dev setup uses VS 2005, but it could be > made to work with VS 2008 with little trouble. The setup is designed > to cross compile the x64 and ia64 architectures.
It starts with the need for the hardware. My only Itanium 1 system left is old and about to crash any day now, and it doesn't support debugging quite at all. Even if it was new and fast, I still would need to log into that machine, download the installer, and run it - preferably in multiple combinations (of, say, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008, with and without the VS 2008 CRT installed). In any case, I wouldn't be using makefiles, but adjust the project files of VS 2008 to invoke the Itanium compiler (for which I would first have to find out where to get it). There is also one serious problem with cross-compilation: Tcl/Tk doesn't support it well. In particular, Tcl 8.5 tries to run the resulting Tcl interpreter to generate timezone data, which fails. I had to hack the makefile temporarily to get around that (for AMD64), but it's not pretty. A minor problem with cross-compilation is that it doesn't work well for PGO builds. Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
