> Does anyone have more official documentation? 

The commit I  linked to has the full option removal at October 7 2010 (see the fifth item in the changelog entry). Any GCC (major) version released after that will have it completely removed.

Deprecation happened (according to the first doc change mentioning this option as being deprecated) on 2009-03-25: http://repo.or.cz/w/official-gcc.git/commit/6609be22531f447aeddbb3f670ad7883036cb23f

It looks like GCC 4.4 and up have this change in them, by looking at their commit logs. Anyone using GCC 4.3 on MinGW should be shot (but that's just my humble opinion, rather radical I admit ;-) )

Note this has really nothing to do with current Cygwin or the cygwin platform; MinGW was part of the Cygwin source for a long time, and every MinGW compiler was burdened to search the Cygwin header and lib paths. These commits fixed that problem.

MinGW(-w64) is a native compiler for Win32 just as MSVC is. Links to msvcrt.dll and has no POSIX translation/compatibility layer like the Cygwin DLL.

May I ask for a reconsideration to commit a fix for this for Python 2.7 at least? With the version check it doesn't hurt anyone, instead it helps prevent further confusion and support requests on the MinGW side. Distutils pop up everywhere, and the projects depending on them rely on them working correctly. Thanks