> 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
There’s a misunderstanding: I explained why 2.5, 2.6 and 3.1 can’t be fixed, but if you look at the versions at the top of this page, you’ll see 2.7, 3.2 and 3.3 listed.  This will get fixed in these versions.

> Ah, our good friend grep.
Thanks for the exploration.  This looks complicated.

> should the question be "what's the first mingw gcc version that
> -mno-cygwin usage unnecessary" rather than finding the first version
> the option was removed?
If removing the option in these versions causes no change (i.e. doesn’t break any code), I agree.

> and, does it matter whether you're building on win for win, or cross
> compiling for win from nix?
I’m afraid I don’t know enough about Windows and MinGW to answer that.  If we can’t be sure about versions and consequences here, I’ll go to the MinGW ML.

> btw, can distutils do a lightweight configure-like check for feature
> presence rather than going a gcc version check?
There is a config command that’s not very used, but it would be IMO overkill to use it in the compiler code.