[lxml-dev] Using, or building, lxml in Windows with Cygwin

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

David Antliff wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 18:46, Stefan Behnel wrote:
>> David Antliff wrote:
>>> I am trying to get the Windows lxml egg to work with Cygwin, Python 2.5.2
>>> on WindowsXP, 32bit. I wasn't able to find a Cygwin package for lxml so
>>> I felt I needed to obtain or build a win32 version of lxml. I want to
>>> use the xpath
>>> functionality that lxml provides in python scripts, running in Cygwin.
>>>
>>> *** All commands below are issued in a Cygwin bash shell ***
>> Any reason why you use the Cygwin Python installation instead of a normal
>> Windows build?
> 
> The situation is that I'm maintaining a build environment for FPGA
> tools. The users are hardware engineers with little experience in
> software issues. We use Cygwin because it provides GNU make, python,
> perl, and a bunch of other GNU things. The main problem is that the
> environment is already deployed and I want to avoid requiring people
> to manually update their Cygwin installation to bring in an lxml
> library. Actually, there doesn't even seem to BE a Cygwin lxml
> library.

Yes, I assumed there wasn't.


> If possible, I want to avoid switching to the Windows native python
> because nobody else has it installed.

Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense to me.


> my thinking was that I could bundle the lxml egg with the next version of
> the build system and nobody would need to manually intervene. As it
> stands, there's also a need to install setuptools but this can be done
> easily and automatically.

I don't think we really /require/ setuptools. IIRC, it's always been optional.


> Do you think the binary egg provided on the web does not work because
> I'm using a different version of Python (Cygwin, rather than Windows
> native) with it?

Yes, I'm pretty sure that is the case. It was built with a different
compiler for a different environment.

Stefan