This is the first patch in a series of patching of
porting Python to native win32, while still using the
autoconf-based build process. The compiler used is
mingw, the build environment used is msys, a stripped
down Cygwin from the mingw project.

This patch does several things:

* change _alloca to alloca for both mingw and Visual
C++, to avoid unnecessary #ifdef-ing.

* Change the makesetup shell script to work for win32,
where for some weird reason we have a module 'nt' built
from a posixmodule.c file.

* Change on occurence of  #ifdef MS_WINDOWS in
posixmodule.c where it should really have been #ifdef
Py_WIN_WIDE_FILENAMES

* Change the #ifdefs in posixmodule.c so that it can be
built with both MSVC and mingw

The result of this patch is that we can build a
statically built python.exe with a simple
./configure
make
under mingw/msys.

There's, however, still of additional work to do until
we can build a native win32 Python with the
autoconf-based build process.

Please apply this ASAP, as I want to avoid having a
diverging Python tree on my harddisk (this makes patch
creation a lot more difficult).

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Guido, if you think that there should either be one big
patch that enables Python to be built with mingw or nothing
at all, then please close this as 'rejected' or whatever.
There are good reasons for doing so, just as there are
arguments for incremental patches, like I described above.

I won't feel offended, especially as I know how annoying it
is for myself to have a SF entry page full of this kind of
patches/bugs :)

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What I'd like to see most is for somebody with CVS commit
permission for Python *and* an understanding of mingw to
start making the changes in Python's CVS. I'd be willing to
give you CVS permission for this, if you're willing to work
with python-dev regarding the acceptability of the various
changes you're proposing. I presume you'll quickly get a
sense for what kind of changes are non-controversional and
can be checked in without asking.

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Sounds great. I'd have needed advice from python-dev anyway,
especially on the parts where autoconf is concerned (I'm
relatively green there).

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Welcome, Gerhard!  You have commit privileges now.  If 
you need any help with SourceForge mechanics, ask on 
Python-Dev and you'll get more advice than you can stand 
<wink>.

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Cool :-)

I'm assigning this patch to myself now.

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Gerhard, is there any reason to leave this patch open?

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This patch is too incomplete to be useful. I'm working on
posixmodule.c again right now and will try to come up with
something more complete. I'll have to ask on python-dev on
how to proceed, anyway.