Preliminaries for Building Python / Sage on Windows

This wiki is a repository for my notes on software / scripts I needed or used to get Python/Sage building under windows.

Compiler / Development Environment

1. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008

Other stuff

1. GnuWin32
   To get access to gzip/tar, I downloaded those packages. You can also just download all the packages.
   All the packages get installed by default to %ProgramFiles%\GnuWin32\, and the .exe files reside in %ProgramFiles%\GnuWin32\bin\

2. Subversion Client
   Needed to get the updated source of the libraries that Python 2.6 depends on. I downloaded mine from http://www.open.collab.net/downloads/subversion/.

3. Cvs Client
   Needed to get the latest version of the source for PyWin32.
   I downloaded mine from http://www.wincvs.org/.

4. Set up some scripts to help yourself.
   Make a windows shell script to setup your environment.
   Make a file named something like %USERPROFILE%\my_sage_env.cmd.
   A good one to get started is something like:

echo off
cls
echo "Running CMD w/ special environment variables set..."
set PATH=%PATH%;%ProgramFiles%\GnuWin32\bin;%ProgramFiles%\CollabNet Subversion Client
echo on

• Make a shortcut to %SystemRoot%\System32\cmd.exe. Then right click, select properties and on the Shortcut Tab, edit the Target field to:

D:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /K %USERPROFILE%\my_sage_env.cmd