Building dynamically-linked lxml on windows using mingw32

Hello,

I've successfully used ming32 to build lxml (dynamically linked). I was unable 
to get the static linking to work, because I was unable to get the VC++ 2003 
Toolkit compiler and trying static linking with gcc gives lots of errors.

Step 1: Download and install Mingw from http://mingw.org.

Step 2: Start a command window and set the path to include MingW eg. 
     set path=%path%;C:\mingw\bin

Step 3: Download the win32 libs from ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/win32. You will 
need 

iconv-1.9.1.win32.zip
libxml2-2.6.23.win32.zip
libxslt-1.1.15.win32.zip
zlib-1.2.3.win32.zip

Step 4: Follow the instructions in doc/build.txt for extraction, but use the 
following setupStaticBuild function instead of the one mentioned:

def setupStaticBuild():
    "See doc/build.txt to make this work."
    cflags = [
         "-I..\\libxml2-2.6.23.win32\\include",
         "-I..\\libxslt-1.1.15.win32\\include",
         "-I..\\zlib-1.2.3.win32\\include",
         "-I..\\iconv-1.9.1.win32\\include"
        ]
    xslt_libs = [
         "..\\libxml2-2.6.23.win32\\bin\\libxml2.dll",
         "..\\libxslt-1.1.15.win32\\bin\\libxslt.dll",
         "..\\libxslt-1.1.15.win32\\bin\\libexslt.dll",
         "..\\iconv-1.9.1.win32\\bin\\iconv.dll",
         "..\\zlib-1.2.3.win32\\lib\\zlib.lib"         
        ]
    result = (cflags, xslt_libs)
    return result

Yes, We ARE linking to DLLs directly as the export libraries are incomplete.

5. Copy the 4 DLLs mentioned above to the src/lxml folder. Also, add this line 
towards the 
   end of the file, just below the "packages = ['lxml']," line:

    package_data={'': ['*.dll']},

6. To build the extension, use the following command:

   python setup.py build --c=mingw32 --static bdist_wininst

You should have an installer which uses lxml dynamically linked to the above 
DLLs. The installer size is around 1344kB, which is almost the same size you 
get via static linking. (as a comparison, lxml-1.0.2.win32-static-py2.4.exe is 
around 1266kB).

Hope this helps,
Ashish