[Martin]
Thanks for the message.  My previous message actually quoted Dan, not you, so no apology is necessary.


[Dan]
> That's bull, Eric.
Could you rephrase this?  English is not my native language.

> This is not about a corner case in cygwin.
Oops I confused cygwin and mingw, apologies.

> This is about mingw, which is the **main free software that builds
> executables on Windows**. You know, for when you don't want to require
> your users to install Visual Studio.
Let me state that I fully sympathize with people who use Windows and still want to use free software as much as possible, even though some version of Visual Studio is now available at no cost.  Again, the fact is that many core developers don’t use Windows, and the official CPython builds use MSVC, so from this viewpoint, MinGW is a niche platform for CPython.  It does not mean that patches are rejected, just that it’s harder for me to assess them.

> Additionally, both you and Matthias imposed artificial conditions that
> made it unlikely for patches to be created (search for "will insist").
Martin used that in a comment about backward compatibility, which we do take seriously.  Roumen’s patches don’t break backward compat if I read them correctly.

> Now, I have to agree that the larger python community (and not an
> under-resourced team like your good selves) should be involved in
> distutils
Yes, more feedback, bug reports, patches and reviews from the community would help.

> (or choose and **support** a different package manager). But I'm not
> sure where I could file a bug for that
An effort is ongoing to define the successors of distutils.  One problem is that it lacks features (like dependencies), and at the same time it tries to be too much (build, upload, install).  The community (Python core developers, packaging tools developers, users) is working on these things.

> (again, blogging may be the best choice).
If you want to get involved in the packaging discussions, you can join the distutils-sig mailing list.  If you want to push this specific issue forward, testing the patches on your system would help.  If you want to support Python on MinGW in general, you can contribute a buildbot to our continuous integration system, so that we can see when things break.