> I'm trying to read the patch. It contains many interesting things (and 
> others I have no opinon about), but it is very large, and makes it
> difficult to comment or find why some change were made etc.

amaury: unfortunately, the development on adding mingw32 as a platform has been ongoing for well over three years, with absolute silence and rejection of its existence.  it was only when a fourth person showed interest in it (LRN) that it became "accepted" - but that was... only two months ago!

basically, this situation should never have been allowed to get this
far: the very first patch that was created, three nearly four years ago, should have been accepted, and then an incremental process could have been taken, _and_ the silly situation in which distutils gets frozen during the time when people have been completely ignoring this ongoing work would never have occurred.

but, that's the situation: the bed has been made, and now developers have to lie in it.  sorry to be the one that's pointing this out, but...

anyway.

your idea to split this into a series has merit: personally i much prefer git, because of git-format-patch, but i have to say i've never done "patch regeneration" based on a "review / change-patch-in-middle-of-series / regenerate git-format-patch" cycle.  should be fun! :)

but the very very first thing that has to happen - before any of this work is begun - is for the distutils freeze to be lifted, or for someone to come up with a _sensible_ alternative solution.

if that cannot be done, then roumen and LRN won't _stop_ working on python-mingw32: the end result will be that they just... continue to create a single patch file that will just get larger and larger.