Michael,
I want to somehow start a very tentative *actual* step toward doing a
native windows port. I installed
Windows into vmware on my laptop yesterday. I think the first thing
we need to do is decide whether
we're going to:
(1) build our own Python using mingw,
or (2) use the standard Visual C++ built Python that is distributed at
python.org.
The advantage to (1) is .... I can't think of any, except maybe "control"
but my impression when we last talked was
that you thought (1) was the way to go.
The advantage to (2) is that whatever we do it will play very nicely with
all existing Python libraries that get distributed for windows. In particular,
graphics libraries, Enthought's Scipy for windows, etc., will all just work.
If we go the (2) route, we can just immediately check scipy/numpy off
the list, and any other python library that has been ported to native windows
already.
If we do (2), step 1 will be to figure out the modern way to build
Python extensions
against that standard Visual C++ built Python, either using mingw or Visual C++.
I did this 3 years ago using mingw, and it was possible but painful. Things
may have changed.
Once we decide on (1) versus (2), the next step is to somehow get
pexpect or some
pexpect replacement (with equivalent functionality) to work in the
context of Windows.
Once that is done, we can port the Sage notebook and all interfaces to
Windows -- they're
pure python and depend only on Twisted, so this shouldn't be
impossible. We should
also port the pure python matplotlib-based plotting code, which should be easy.
Next we port the calculus Python functionality, which is again pure python.
Given a maxima binary, we'll then have Sage's calculus functionality
and plotting
fully ported. This will on its own be a very useful program for a lot
of people.
After that we can start thinking about the much harder parts of the
SAge library that
involve Cython, external C/C++ libraries, [lib]Singular, etc., etc.
By far the main difficult and thing that scares me above is pexpect.
Even in Cygwin,
pexpect sucked...
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
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