For me, it's all about being able to build useful software. I like Python a lot, but my goal is and has always been cross compilation of gdb with Python support. To that end, if I have to maintain some out of tree patches for 2.7.3 then so be it. For 3.x things are looking better and I'm hopeful that we'll get everything merged at some point.

For anyone who's interested in my almost-final set of patches against the released tarballs for both 2.7.3 and 3.3.0b1 they're at:

http://mingw-and-ndk.googlecode.com/files/python-273-and-330b1-patches-WIP.7z

AFAIK, the only real change I'll be making is to the build script.

Once Matthias has finished merging Roumen's cross compilation work to 3, I'll rebase my 3.3.0b1 patches against that and open an issue for each patch. If mingw cross touches too much of distutils for people's liking then hopefully we can get mac osx cross merged and that'll at least mean that the infrastructure is cross-compilation friendly.