wine users - Jan 2009 - success: compilation of python2.5.2 under wine+msys+mingw32

hi folks,
i promised i'd get python built under wine - and i'm happy to report
that this goal has been successfully achieved.
http://bugs.python.org/issue4954 if anyone's interested.  what has
been achieved is that a python.exe, libpython2.5.dll, an implib
libpython2.5.dll.a and a python2.5.def have all been successfully
created using an entirely free software toolchain, along with the
dynamic libraries (such as pyexpat.pyd - python for win32's convention
is .pyd not .so).
running the regression testing has been... interesting :)  several
bugs in wine have been detected, along with faults in the header-files
that need to be corrected.  tmpfile() is faulty; MAX_LONG and MIN_INT
#defines cause problems; the default file format CRLF instead of LF
causes the builtin regression test to fail; _ctypes _utterly_ borks on
c structure creation and manipulation but is using assembly-stuff (a
copy of libffi is included in python) - there are a few more, but out
of 350 tests, the majority of them succeed.
amazingly.
anyway, the point of this message is primarily to let people know that
this successful compile shows just how far along wine is coming, and
it's like a really big hairy deal that python can now be compiled for
win32 platforms, for native use on windows or on wine, _without_
having to have a proprietary operating system or a proprietary
compiler to do it.
now it's possible to port things like pygtk2, pyqt4, pywebkit-gtk and
numpy to win32 etc. (because of the header files and the implibs) -
again, _without_ requiring proprietary technology.
which is absolutely fantastic.
thank you to everyone on the wine team.
l.