Re: Using, or building, lxml in Windows with Cygwin

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 18:35, Stefan Behnel<stefan_ml <at> behnel.de> wrote:
> David Antliff wrote:
>> I am trying a slightly different approach - compiling entirely within
>> Cygwin, using Cygwin's gcc.
>
> Right, that should be best anyway.
>
>
>> What I have done is unpacked lxml-2.2.1.tgz.gz into lxml-2.2.1, then
>> inside that directory I try:
>>
>> $ python setup.py build --static-deps
>>
>> This proceeds to download libxml2 and libxslt, unpack them, and build
>> them. But it runs into numerous problems related to include/library
>> paths.
>
> ... which you may be able to fix using appropriate CFLAGS/LDFLAGS.
[snip]
> I don't know if you install the libiconv developer package on your machine
> (I hope that exists in Cygwin), because building against the shared lib
> should work just fine here. Maybe you need to point gcc to the right
> include and/or lib directory. I wonder why it didn't add "-liconv"
> automatically...
>
> You can also try to go the ugly route and add "/usr/lib/libiconv.a" to your
> CFLAGS, but I think you'll be happier with the shared lib.
>
>
>> I wonder why setup.py didn't automatically download libiconv when it
>> downloaded libxml2 and libxslt... hmm
>
> Because the static build was designed for MacOS-X, where only those two
> libraries are a problem. The libiconv is binary compatible enough across
> versions not to pose any major problems. So it's best to build dynamically
> against libiconv.
>
> That said, it shouldn't be too hard to add code to also download libiconv
> and build it. I would be happy to receive a patch that accepts an optional
> list of library names for the --static-deps option, as in
> "--static-deps=libxml2,libxslt,iconv", and would then download and build
> all requested libraries. Although I doubt that it would make sense (or even
> work) to pass only "--static-deps=iconv", so maybe a new option
> "--build-iconv" would be better.

Hi Stefan,

I must admit I don't understand how setup.py, setupinfo.py and
distutils all fits together.  By watching the output of 'python
setup.py build --static-deps' it's fairly clear to me what is needed
to fix each step, but I can't work out where one sets extra CFLAGS or
LDFLAGS in setup.py so that I can continue the process beyond each
error.

What would also help is if I knew what command I was meant to be
using. The documentation suggests all sorts of options and I'm really
not sure what I'm doing. Here's what I want to end up with:
  - a statically compiled python 'egg' of lxml that I can simply
distribute with a python script and use in Cygwin.

Here's what I currently have:
 - lxml-2.2.1 tar.gz unpacked
 - Cygwin *without* libxml2 or libxslt installed (I don't want my
users to have to install these via Cygwin setup.exe).
 - gcc, ld, etc are all present

As per a previous email, I tried:
$ python setup.py build --static-deps

But this has problems finding libiconv. You suggested I could
use-liconv to fix this, but I can't work out where to actually put
this in setup.py or setupinfo.py.

$ ls /usr/lib/libic*
/usr/lib/libiconv.a  /usr/lib/libiconv.dll.a  /usr/lib/libiconv.la

However that's on my own machine - it turns out that nobody else has
Cygwin's libiconv installed, so I'd like to *statically* link in
libiconv too. Dynamically linking won't work in my case.

I think the biggest problem I have is that having to run "python
setup.py build" every time clears out everything. It would be good if
I could get setup.py to simply print all the command lines it intends
to use without actually running them...

Any assistance you can give me would be greatly appreciated please.

Regards,

-- David.